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Comment by fluxist | Hacker News Reader

Dihydromyricetin[1] can accomplish this remarkably effectively. It's available on Amazon.

Also works great for hangovers.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3292407/

Just a warning to everyone: This effect doesn't seem to have much scientific support beyond the cited paper. Other work has followed up and was not able to replicate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8603706/.

The test is trivial - take a breathalyzer and compare results after say 2, 3, 5 beers before and after. Some mental / IQ test could be added to make sure we don't have folks driving around passing breath test while being very drunk.

Something tells me if they can't provide such a trivial result, it ain't working as folks expect (and god knows what nasty side effects it can have).

a hangover isn't strictly correlated to alcohol - you can have a hangover with a 0% alcohol reported by the breathalyzer. I've read drinking alcohol starts processes that damage the brain for the following 3 weeks, and the brain needs additional 3 weeks to heal. Obviously what people mean by a hangover has a much shorter span, I think mostly related to dehydration.

I learned about this and it does work in my experience, best if taken both at the beginning and end of the night.

While it doesn’t alleviate all of the hangover symptoms it does nearly eliminate all of the most unpleasant ones.

Which are the pleasant hangover symptoms?

Moderate lethargy, satisfaction from eating fatty and protein rich foods, things like that.

If it wasn't pleasant, not that many people would endure it regularly as there are.

…people are generally drinking for the immediate effects, not the hangover.

Sure, and generally you don't drink enough to get a hangover so I fail to see the relevance.

I said it eliminates the most unpleasant ones, leaving the less unpleasant or neutral ones. I did meet a woman once who never got hangovers but instead a mild euphoric high, almost certainly some unusual GABA related brain chemistry.

For the rest of us though, what’s left over is a mild lethargic unfocused feeling, no headaches or nausea just a strong need not to be bothered and lay around all morning.

Great suggestion. There is also Kislip, which seems to be based on probiotics and, like DHM, also helps metabolize acetaldehyde. Acetium (a Finnish product) also claims to lower acetaldehyde, but that might be a localized effect (mouth/nasopharynx + GI tract).

Zbiotics gives you genetically modified probiotic bacteria that secrete ALDH into your gut.

I'm not sure how that's helpful. It looks like ALDH is responsible for breaking down acetaldehyde. However, the pathway for ethanol to become acetaldehyde happens primarily in the liver with ADH. So while this may flood your stomach with ALDH, that's mainly only useful in the blood stream after alcohol is metabolized right?

Is the theory here that because the digestive tracks is a large organs filled with blood the resulting ALDH would interact?

My next question is do these, and how many, probiotic bacteria survive the acid wash of the stomach?

Are there studies around this?

I think most of the ALDH from the stomach/LI would end up in the liver though.

Note the study involves injections. The oral route is subject to digestion.

This is an animal study (rats). Use on your own risk.

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