Useful tips
Content:
You smoke while drinking
You eat like this called healthy food
You drink cocktails with drinks that are high in sugar
You forget to drink water
You skip exercise
You take pills to relieve hangover symptoms Do
you prefer dark-colored drinks
The habit of drinking a lot and often is, of course, the most important prerequisite for getting drunk on any holiday or even on weekdays. But if you don't want to celebrate the first morning of the new year with a heavy head and a skewed face, if you don't want to be confused and categorically against not being able to remember what you did on the day before, it means it's time to give up seven habits, which we'll discuss below.
1. You smoke while you drink
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Admit it, did you promise at the end of the previous year that you would give up such an addiction as smoking with the arrival of the new year? But you should quit not when the
new year arrives, but in the last days of the outgoing year! At least if you don't want your hangover to be really intense and painful.
Read also: Why New Year is celebrated on January 1 and what is New Year in the old way
And these are not empty words! As a result of one of the studies (referred to at the end of the article) conducted by specialists from Brown University in America, it was absolutely certain that both drinkers and smokers suffer more from a severe hangover (or a hangover in general!) than people who just drink but don't smoke.
Two groups of people participated in the above study. Each study subject in both groups of subjects consumed the same amount of alcohol. However, the first group included smokers, and the second group included non-smokers. The first ones felt much worse the next morning. And the obvious recorded signs of a hangover were more pronounced.
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Additional studies have been carried out, as a result of which it was possible to find that a substance such as acetaldehyde contained in inhaled tobacco smoke is largely to blame. It affects so-called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the brain, which are responsible for how each of us reacts to drinking.
Take your time to switch to low-nicotine cigarettes or so-called nicotine-free e-cigarettes! The fact is that there have been insufficient studies that would identify factors other than nicotine that affect the increase in hangovers. But it seems that there are other substances in cigarettes that make it impossible to avoid a heavy head in the morning.
2. You eat so-called healthy food
Yes, you read it right: eating healthy is exactly what you should not do if you have to gain enough. Just don't think that proper healthy eating is a bad habit in principle! No, of course, avoid sugar on normal days if you feel like it; eat only salads; avoid fatty foods.
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However, while drinking alcohol, this tactic will almost certainly lead you to a hangover in the morning. Nutritionists say that fatty foods, quite conditionally, literally stick to the inner walls of the stomach and stay there longer than other foods, which reduces the amount absorbed into the body of alcohol. Here's the whole secret that a person who ate “healthy” salads is more likely to get a hangover than a lover of fatty foods.
However, this does not mean that you should now eat all sorts of fatty treats and junk food before every alcohol consumption! On the contrary, on days when drinking alcohol cannot be avoided (I would like to believe that you have an overwhelming minority of them), you should try to look for an alternative to fatty foods in so-called sources healthy fats and oils.
As a menu for a stormy evening, you can recommend not fast food and smoked meats with mayonnaise, but, for example, pasta with Italian pesto sauce (green sauce), tuna salad, olive vinaigrette butter, turkey meat. It is useful to half-burn seeds in advance (they contain a lot of healthy fats). Think not only about your head, but also about your stomach, which is sure to thank you in the morning.
3. You drink cocktails with drinks that are high in sugar
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And here comes a blessed evening (or rather night), when we all enjoy seeing off the old year and congratulating each other on the new one. If you do not want to suffer from a hangover in the morning, it is strongly recommended that you avoid cocktails based on sugary drinks (for example, canned juices, fanta, cola, etc.).
Any more or less competent therapist or nutrition specialist will tell you that carbonated drinks, which contain a large proportion of sugar, make a significant negative contribution in dehydration of the body. By the way, filling our stomach with carbon dioxide from a drink causes a false feeling of satiety.
In fact, the stomach becomes empty faster than if we ate, which causes alcohol to affect our bodies even more and more quickly. Dehydration alone is certainly not the cause of a hangover. However, it can provoke severe headaches, which often accompany any hangover.
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What should we do in this case? If you do not have such a goal — to get drunk quickly, then suffer from known consequences in the morning — it is recommended to forget, for example, about drinks such as whiskey or cognac with cola, vodka with juice, etc. It's better to order pure whiskey or pure vodka — the harm from such drinks in its pure form will be much less.
4. You forget to drink water
A literate person does not have to ask “drink or not drink alcohol with water” at all. As mentioned above, dehydration makes a significant negative contribution to severe headaches, which often affect people who suffer from a hangover in the morning. And you don't have to be a doctor to understand this!
It's no secret that alcohol is a diuretic (that is, a substance that has a diuretic effect on the body). In other words, after drinking a certain amount of alcohol, we run to the toilet to urinate much more often than our body usually needs. When you get back, you skip another drink and then another one…
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As fluid is removed from the body, our body begins to experience the effects of dehydration, unless, of course, you stop dehydration by drinking water. It is also very important to drink not only at night, when you wake up from what “dries” you, but just before going to bed. Place a liter bottle of water at the head, drink it before going to bed, and then fall face down on the pillow.
However, even these measures are unlikely to save us completely from the effects of dehydration caused by significant drinking. That is why it is extremely important to drink some water between drinking glasses/glasses/wine glasses/glasses (or other dishes) with alcohol (not in by no means carbonated!) with water.
5. You're skipping physical training
That's right — the amount and intensity of physical training are also determining factors that can influence the extent of your suffering during a hangover. That is why before the New Year holidays, it is strongly recommended not to miss sports activities, devoting more time and effort to them.
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This is due to the same dehydration of the body, which must be avoided by all means when drinking alcohol. Water is the basis of our body. People who work hard in the gym usually boast more muscle mass. Muscle mass is a body structure that can effectively retain fluid in our body, preventing dehydration.
In other words, if your fitness is flawless, then your body loses less fluid due to the dehydration effect caused by drinking alcohol. Use this fact as a motivation next time if you don't have the willpower to go to the gym. The more regular you study, the better prepared you are for the New Year celebration!
6. You take pills to relieve hangover symptoms
At first glance, it may seem that taking various hangover medications (including painkillers) in advance is not a bad idea, as long as we are in for a noisy New Year celebration. In fact, this should not be done, as you exacerbate the situation by putting an additional burden on our liver.
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After all, it is the liver that takes the first and main impact of alcohol, breaking it down and removing it from the body. If you add, for example, analgesics to alcohol, you force your liver to actively work on breaking down medications.
In other words, the liver spends its resources not only on the process of breaking down alcohol, but also on breaking down the drug, which increases the time it takes to remove alcohol from the body. Once upon a time, it was almost a tradition to take paracetamol against a hangover headache.
Admit it, how often did you use paracetamol to relieve hangover symptoms and relieve headaches? However, studies show that this component, together with alcohol, can have an extremely negative effect on the functioning of the liver. Regular intake of alcohol and paracetamol can even lead to liver failure.
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The problem is precisely in regularity and quantity, since up to ten percent of paracetamol is converted as a result of the effects of the body's enzymes into the hepatotoxic substance N-acetyl-P- benzoquinonimine. This toxin accumulates in the liver, which is unable to cope with large amounts of it.
Does this problem seem insignificant to you? Consider that the number of people admitted to hospitals with toxic liver poisoning due to alcohol and paracetamol (or paracetamol-based drugs) is increasing dramatically it is during the New Year holidays. Moreover, regardless of whether we are talking about our country or other countries.
7. Do you prefer dark-colored drinks
Do you find it strange that the color of your alcoholic drink significantly influences the intensity of your hangover? Totally in vain. In fact, this is one of the most serious factors (aside from consuming ethanol itself, of course) that should definitely not be ignored when we are discussing how to avoid hangovers.
Let's get things first: the process of making alcoholic beverages produces components that accompany this procedure that are not related to ethanol. They're called “congeners.” In fact, these are by-products that occur during fermentation and distillation.
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In other words, congeners are impurities that, for example, give dark color to dark beer or a liquor. Quite often, congeners are added specifically to give a particular alcoholic beverage a certain aroma.
Drinks that contain high levels of congeners can cause the worst hangover compared to pure alcoholic beverages.
There are also congeners in types of alcohol such as light rum, gin, or even vodka. However, their content in dark types of alcohol (for example, dark beers, whiskey, cognac, etc.) is much higher. A large number of congeners are usually found in low-quality liquors, cheap brandy, and conventional flavored spirits.
Read also: 5 ways to make a wish on New Year's Eve
There are much fewer congeners in distilled alcohol (especially in the highest quality types of alcohol), since it is specially purified from all impurities. And if you plan to hold out all New Year's Eve until morning, ask the bartender to pour light alcohol instead of dark alcohol (even if vodka doesn't seem as tasty as liquor to you!).