Hangover prevention pill that breaks down alcohol in the body goes on sale | Hacker News Reader

Hangover prevention pill that breaks down alcohol in the body goes on sale

telegraph.co.uk

28 pointsdavidbarker25 comments

"product is the first pre-drinking hangover pill ever to reach the market"

Anyone remember the product Chaser? It worked, but it took a lot of the fun out of drinking which led people to drink more. I never was able to learn why it was taken off the market (maybe because it made people drink more?). There was another product also, RU-21, which I tried and also worked to some extent but made me feel weird (I think mainly a long lasting unusual sweet taste in the mouth) so I didn't use it.

It would be interesting to know what the breakdown products of alcohol+Myrkl are, acetaldehyde is the intermediate breakdown product that causes problems in the liver. If Myrkl breaks down alcohol in the same way it may cause just as much damage, even if it clears peoples heads faster. If it prevents acetaldehyde from reaching the liver it could possibly improve health. These articles are interesting:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/19093373/doctor-truth-new-ha...

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/myrkl-hangover-pill-works-where-08...

They suggest the alcohol is broken down in the gut so it never reaches the liver and the breakdown products are water and CO2. It may cause the alcohol to create less of a high though, leading people to drink more (though if a percentage of that alcohol is also broken down before reaching the liver maybe the overall effect on health is still good?) I wonder if it would work as a "get sober faster" pill?

I wonder how long the bacteria persists, could it become permanently entrenched? Does it mess with the microbiome?

Turning alcohol into CO2 + water is pretty exothermic. If this is happening in the stomach to a large amount of alcohol quickly it seems like burns might be a concern.

I don't know why they call this a "hangover prevension pill"... manufacturer calls it a "pre-drinking" pill and it is said to break down alcohol.

So my interpretation is that it allows people to drink more. Sure it may mean that you get less hangover because you absorbed less alcohol but let's face it, that's not what's going to happen...

Also the alcohol isn’t the only thing which causes the hangover. Most of the metabolites that are left over from processing the alcohol make you feel like shit.

What I’ve found works well enough for me is drinking a pint of water in between every unit of alcohol. I wish handing out a water with every shot / beer / etc was standard practice.

That used to work for me, about 10 years ago. Now it doesn't matter how much water I drink, I still feel like shit.

There are countries like Korea where it may be expected that you drink (I've heard it can be a significant part of work culture there). I wonder if this would be useful for people that don't really want to have the negatives of a lot of alcohol, but can't afford the negatives of saying no.

Surely the whole point of drinking is not to have the alcohol break down more quickly?

Up until the point where you want to immediately remove it all (when you fall asleep)

Well indeed, but they say you should take this before you start drinking! An hour or two before you want to stop, perhaps.

In the test they ran they even had people take a pill every day for a week in advance. These are bacteria so it kinda makes sense that it a takes a while for them to get cozy.

I'm normal on the alcohol tolerance spectrum, but I have experience with people who have "Asian Flush" i.e. can't metabolize alcohol properly and feel like crap on as little as half a drink. Would this help with that?

Help should really be in quotation marks. I also have experience with more than one person who simply doesn't get hangovers. Drink a whole bottle of vodka and go to bed and feel fresh as morning daisies when you get up. Superpower! Not! The deleterious long-term effects of alcohol overuse aren't reduced, just the short term punishment.

as well as two common vitamins (L-Cysteine and Vitamin B12

Is this why there was such a big push to reclassify NAC n-acetylcysteine as a drug vs. a supplement? People already take NAC for the same purpose.

Some shady pharma companies really, really, really do not want us to buy NAC as the cheap and harmless supplement it is because they want to sell it or related substances as medicine.

Look for "Possible Motives and Outcomes" under my link.

https://www.nutraceuticalsworld.com/issues/2022-03/view_colu...

AFAIK this was more because NAC was being touted as a COVID cure because of it's anti-inflammatory properties and being used in pneumonia

I could imagine people doing that. NAC was one of the many components I used in combination with the Isothiocyanates Sulforaphane and Myrosinase to trigger an immune response when I was a-symptomatic with Covid.

Or we can skip the toxicity all together: https://sentiaspirits.com/pages/about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/s_Nutt#Alcarelle_&_GABA_Labs

This sounds useful for people who have to mingle with alcohol as part of their job. Kind of defeats the purpose for recreational drinkers though.

What job makes you drink alcohol ?

Two that spring to mind are enterprise sales and computer security (for different reasons).

I'd add quality assurance / testing to the list

when i worked in asia fora short while drinking with coworkers was effectively mandatory.

"optional" but in practice mandatory

-- tangentially related was reading this just yesterday - Hangover drinks: What are the best choices and do they really work?

https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220704000869

(the Korean hangover treatment industry is worth over USD$170MM a year) --

Without the paywall: https://archive.ph/cAGyP

If this works as advertised, I could see this being useful at the end of a night (as long as you remember to take it).

I been using Zbiotics. kinda similar concept. Makes the morning after much better

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