Hangover Helper

Researcher Richard Stephens offers the straight dope on your morning-after misery:

Do we know what causes hangovers?

Not completely, but there’s definitely some fairly good evidence. One component is the way that alcohol is metabolized. When you drink alcohol, there’s an enzyme in the body that breaks down the ethanol in alcohol into metabolites – after you’ve had a drink of alcohol and felt drunk, once you start to feel sober again, that’s because your body has metabolized the ethanol. But once the ethanol has been metabolized, there are usually other alcohols in smaller quantities in alcoholic beverages. One such compound is methanol, and when the body metabolizes methanol, it metabolizes it into toxins – formaldehyde and formic acid. And those make you feel ill, sort of poison you a little bit.

So one part of a hangover is the production of formaldehyde and formic acid, which comes online about 10 or so hours after you’ve been drinking. And the interesting thing about that is that the enzymes in your body that break down alcohols would prefer to break down ethanol first and methanol second. And it means that when you’re in a hangover phase, if you drink more alcohol you’ll actually stop your body from breaking down methanol and the things that are making you feel ill, and instead go back to working on the ethanol and leave the methanol intact. So there is a biological basis for the hair of the dog. And that’s one of the possible risk factors for why hangover might be a risk factor for alcoholism rather than a natural block for it.