How I Felt After Binge-Drinking 'Hangover-Free' Alcohol | Hacker News Reader

How I Felt After Binge-Drinking 'Hangover-Free' Alcohol

vice.com

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I don’t drink anymore, but as I got older the hangovers got worse. I looked for different alcohols (low sugar wine) which improved things but every single digit “n” times I drank I’d have a terrible hangover. I figured there’s was an emotional vulnerability component involved.

When pot was legalized I went through all the pot options, but even one drag on a pot vape would leave me with an altered hangover physical feeling the next day.

I just stopped chasing an altered state, or one beyond coffee, and working out more.

You can't dig a ditch all day like you could at 18 either. The hangover isn't getting worse. Your body's ability to just keep going after anything compromising (like mild recreational poisoning) is getting worse so you sit around feeling sick rather than getting up and going about your day like would have.

Oh, so it's the hangover that's getting worse, not the hangover?

About twenty-five years ago I product tested a hangover prevention pill that appears to have been little more than capsules of activated charcoal. IIRC, we were instructed to take one pill before drinking and then one after every other drink. If it wasn't the drunkest I've ever been, it was close. The next day I was low on energy but was otherwise unaffected by the previous night's drinking. As one of my fellow product testers put it "I feel unreasonably ok". I suspect that the product didn't take off because activated charcoal can interfere with absorption of things you want absorbed, like prescription drugs and also because it turned your poop absolute jet black.

The „worst“ interaction orally ingested activated charcoal has is with birth control. BC pills are relatively tiny with a low dosage of active substance, which appears to bind to the charcoal unreasonably well. This interaction should be mentioned by OB GYNs to every woman out there, but sadly they seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to spectacularly failing at their job to inform patients.

I am not mindlessly bashing, or advising against birth control. Seriously, ask women you know if they are aware that birth control fails when you‘re sick with diarrhea, take charcoal or any kind of antibiotic.

Anecdata: the leaflet in the packets of all the ones I’ve taken in both the US and Germany mention the antibiotics pretty clearly, the diarrhea too obliquely, but I’ve never heard of the charcoal thing!

I knew about the antibiotics interaction but not the others! That’s… mildly horrifying.

There is more. Epilepsy medications, obesity, antidepressants, flaxseed, alfalfa, St. John's wort, Crohns, Celiac, IBS, the list goes on and on.

> A third of a bottle of tequila is probably not what you would consider a wild night out

This is sad to see. You know what’s better than binging on hangover-free alcohol? Not binging in the first place.

I can't work out if you're suggesting that a third of a bottle doesn't qualify as a binge, or making a negative remark on society's binging habits.

Binge drinking is defined by the UK at 8+ units for men and 6+ for women, 250ml of tequila is around 10. Although I think reality most men will drink far more than 10 units.

Isn’t a unit usually defined as 1.5oz (~45ml)? So it would be 5-6 unit, not 10.

UK units are 25ml of 40% spirit, but my comment holds up if you adjust the numbers.

Fun fact about UK units: they are equal to the alcohol % (ABV, half of US proof) in 1 litre of the liquid, so calculation is easy. For example a 6% ABV lager means there are 6 units in a litre, so a 500ml can is 3 units and a 330ml can is around 2 units.

A real binge involves days of drinking, not just government 'studies' of 10 units or whatever, where a few extremes are measured up against 'normal' people, that feel a bitt groggy the day after a few.

Hence the UK Police breathalising every accident - especially those in the mornings: a ' hangover'just means 'still drunk'.

"Sad to see", it may be, but there are serious binge-drinkers (who may not necessarily be alcoholic) to whom "Not binging in the first place", wasn't the original intention and also don't regard it as binging if it doesn't last 24+hrs.

>Hence the UK Police breathalising every accident

DUI isn't a cheap ticket. I'm sure the financial incentive has nothing to do with it.

My state was gonna strengthen DUI laws because the safety hand wringers and the teetotalers wanted to. The cops put their foot down and said no because making it a "real crime" would result in people lawyering up, fighting and beating the frivolous charges at the expense of revenue. If that doesn't show you what the priorities are...

What would make it a frivolous charge? I mean, if the test is reasonably reliable and shows the driver had more than the legal limit of alcohol in their blood, What's there to contest?

Between the way the laws are written (tons of discretion given to the officers) and the way the cops operate (they're taught to use word play and field sobriety tests that are specifically designed to let the cop write a police report that makes the suspect look plastered despite reality being otherwise without technically lying[1]) lots of people who are well below the legal limit get charged with DUI. They then spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer getting those charges reduced to "reasonable" stuff (in sarcasm quotes because it's blatant revenue enforcement) that still carries thousands in fines but isn't life ruining.

Don't get me wrong, real DUI is a real crime but for every person charged with that there's another one that thought they were successfully attempting to be lawful by being below the limit who also got charged because that's what the laws permit and that's what the financial incentive is.

So "tightening the DUI laws" here means giving cops greater latitude to charge people below the legal limit - as opposed to, e.g. increasing the penalties for people who are above it?

Here (well, UK and Belgium) I think the police would not charge you if you passed a test (but they might several times).

One explanation I was given for comparatively poor & worsening road safety in the US was the lack of serious penalties for drunk and dangerous driving.

> So "tightening the DUI laws" here means giving cops greater latitude to charge people below the legal limit - as opposed to, e.g. increasing the penalties for people who are above it?

It meant getting eliminating some those crimes the cops don't charge people with but the courts can let people plead down to as lesser offenses and upgrading others to be roughly as life-ruinous as a DUI. This would have caused all those people who caught a DUI charge at .05 because they didn't play their cards right to walk instead of take a plea deal for a lesser charge, much to the detriment of government coffers. I don't think that's necessarily a bad outcome but the point I was making at the time was that financial incentives pervert justice in this case.

(The state in my example was Washington FYI)

>One explanation I was given for comparatively poor & worsening road safety in the US was the lack of serious penalties for drunk and dangerous driving.

And people also complain that the US is a bunch of tee-totaling puritans. Things vary widely by state. I think there's a couple in the midwest that are more lax. Drunk driving has been on a pretty much constant decline since forever so I'm generally suspect of it as an explanation for anything anywhere.

your expectations should be tempered by the fact that this is an article for a company named Vice

A third of a bottle would probably kill me.

Yeah but I’m already bored enough.

Hangover-free alcohol will still shrink grey and white matter for daily units in excess of (0-1]

NAC has been very helpful for me. I have no idea if it really works, but it is the best option I have found.

It’s really hard to evaluate the author’s experience because we don’t know “what a little tired” means or how much alcohol the bar put in his drinks. A BAC reading before bed would have made this more credible.

This is interesting - however as someone who used to enjoy mild drinking and just lost interest in booze, it's still worth stating that alcohol is definitely still bad for the body in a myriad of ways.

2022 was my first completely dry year - health and mental clarity has never been better even in my late 20s.

Isn’t GHB hangover free alcohol (other than the part where you can date rape people with it).

The real downside is that when these drugs are hangover free it’s basically like Xanax (which shares a similar chemical property to alcohol), and it’s very addictive. Alcohol is already extremely addictive

Why can’t we just have nice things

GHB is also far easier to overdose on with an estimated LD50 of only ~15g.

It doesn't specify the actual ingredients. The "grapes" bit makes me think perhaps resveratrol?

Dihydromyricetin is touted as being protective before and after drinking. It appears to have other benefits as well.

I've now become a big fan and follower of Andrew Huberman and a recent podcast has helped sway me to effectively give up alcohol (I was already trending in that direction): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS1pkKpILY

My one remaining active vice is Kratom and I'm pretty comfortable with my relationship with it, considering the value it gives in managing chronic pain. Obviously different strokes for different folks.

for someone purportedly so intent on having a scientific experiment, he didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that these two days of drinking were in a row

if I drink on consecutive days the hangover will be markedly weaker on each additional day

There was a day in between, but yeah, not the best protocol.

Ethanol tolerance builds quickly and is still in effect within a few days. Just having someone binge drink twice in 72 hours is typically enough to reduce hangover symptoms.

I don't produce enough acetylaldehyde dehydrogenase, so when I was young, I had to drink more frequently than others leading up to a party to keep up with their regular drinking pace, and typically suffering worse from the aftereffects.

I didn't understand why at the time, and as soon as I did and the significant increase in risk of cancer and liver damage, I quit drinking.

Also he wasn't told which day was the hangover-free alcohol day (some weak attempt at making it 'scientific') but of course the first day was normal alcohol. So upon the second day he already knew it was hangover-free alcohol, making placebo effect more likely, and possibly changing his drinking habits (time before bed, hydration etc.).

Not that I believe the account at all, this is just a pop article for Vice.

> I awoke at 5 AM with a piercing headache and a parched throat. I drank some water and flopped back into bed but it was no use. I was awake, horribly hungover, and hoping that I’d spent the night drinking plain old tequila. Otherwise I’d have to tell Dahl that his science-alcohol didn’t work.

Like any pop-sci article it's not ment to be rigorous, but provide an interesting narritive. Ideally there would a double blind study with control groups given any combination of normal alcohol and hangover free alcohol but I wouldnt expect that level of rigour from a Vice article.

Weird… I tried this literally last night.

Not his product. But drinking green tea while drinking alcohol to see if it prevents hangover via antioxidants.

Currently writing this from bed… I feel good. Needs more experimentation. More potent antioxidants.

Maybe because you were hydrating together with your booze? Dehydration is a big part of the next day headache.

In my 20s when I knew I had a long night of drinking ahead, I would get a glass of water together with each serving of alcohol. Seemed to work pretty well.

Once dehydration is taken care of, the remaining effects or hangover can be cured with protein-rich food. IIRC vitamin B6 depletes after heavy alcohol intake, and is one of the factor of hangover.

But avoiding alcohol binges often is the better option. The Ballmer's peak of giddiness, sociability and mood elevation tends to be well below what one would call a "binge", and has carries next-day effects.

My technique is to anticipate when things are going to start winding down, and switch to drinking pints of water at the same rate you were drinking alcohol (this is much easier if you were drinking beer). If the night rekindles, you can always switch back.

Interesting! I’ve noticed less hangover effects when drinking herbal tea before bed as well. I even use unintentionally have a/b(ish) tested this with water and have much better results with tea.

I thought maybe the warm water was doing the trick, but maybe now ill test different tea. So far team with tulsi seem to work well for me.

What also works is drinking one or two cups of pedialyte before bed, as hangovers are usually the result of massive dehydration.

I wonder how the results compare with ZBiotics. Extracting anti-oxidants from grapes seems like a more down-to-earth process than genetically engineering probiotics, but with the probiotic approach you don't need to get bartenders & liquor companies on board in order to benefit.

Supposidly the Chinese spirit Maotai is known for its lack of hangovers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maotai

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