Beer before wine, you won’t feel fine
NEW research suggests that the old saying ‘beer before wine and you’ll feel fine’ isn’t actually true.
The findings, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, prove that no matter how you order your alcohol intake, if you drink too much you are still likely to get a hangover.
“Using white wine and lager beer, we didn’t find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around,” said first author Joran Kochling from Germany’s Witten/Herdecke University.
“The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover. The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you’ll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick.
“We should all pay attention to these red flags when drinking.”
To determine the ‘hangover intensity’ of combining beer and wine, researchers gave alcoholic drinks to 90 volunteers.
These test subjects were split into three groups, with the first drinking around two and a half pints of beer followed by four large glasses of white wine. The second group had the same amount of alcohol but in reverse order, and subjects in the third control group had either only beer or only wine.
Participants, several of whom vomited, were asked about their hangover the following day. The study used a crossover, in which participants in study groups one and two were switched to the opposite drinking order a week later.
Dr Kai Hensel, a senior clinical fellow at Cambridge University, said: “Unpleasant as hangovers are, we should remember that they do have one important benefit, at least: they are a protective warning sign.”