Surprising Foods That Can Reduce Hangover Effects By 50%, According To Study

Pickle juice. Fried eggs. Dog hair. If you like to party, you’ve probably tried everything to cure the dreaded hangover.

But the antidote could be in the fridge or in a bowl on the kitchen table, research shows: fruit.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a nutritionist and aspiring podcaster, cited studies showing that fructose, the sugar naturally found in fruits, can reduce the rate at which the body processes alcohol by nearly half.

In a recent podcast, she shared that eating fruits like grapes, watermelon and bananas before a night out can lower blood alcohol levels and therefore reduce hangovers the next day.

In theory, eating fruit the morning after could speed up the recovery process by replenishing salts and rehydrating the body.

But fruit juice may not be a good substitute for fresh produce, warns Dr. Patrick, who hosts the FoundMyFitness podcast.

When fruit is juiced, the sugars bound in the plant cells are released and easily absorbed into the bloodstream. This results in a spike in blood sugar followed by a crash.

However, the sugars in whole fruits are absorbed more slowly, keeping extreme peaks and valleys to a minimum.

According to the research Dr. Patrick references, a person needs a lot of fruit to counteract the effects of alcohol.

Eating one gram of fructose per kilogram of body weight reduces the time a person is drunk by about 31 percent.

For example, a 79 kg (about 175 lbs) man needs about the same amount of fructose in grams: the equivalent of about five or six apples.

According to research from the University of California in 1969, fruit also increased the time it took the body to process and break down alcohol by almost 45 percent. a 2009 report which she quoted.

Certain fruits, such as berries and citrus fruits, also contain antioxidants that benefit liver function.

The liver is responsible for breaking down alcohol. A healthy liver can do this more effectively.

Dr Patrick said: ‘Am I suggesting that fructose is a hangover cure? No. But this is an interesting mechanism by which food and fruit in particular can reduce some of the adverse effects of alcohol.

“Keep in mind that fructose from whole fruit, with the fiber and micronutrients it contains, is very different from the highly refined fructose found in fruit juices.”

In the study According to her, scientists studying metabolic disorders tested the effect of fructose on the way the body helps break down alcohol in 45 healthy men between the ages of 25 and 35.

Research has shown that fructose, both before and after drinking, helps the body process and break down alcohol faster.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick has a podcast and health newsletter called FoundMyFitness, which “provides distilled research on topics like fasting, depression, fitness, and longevity”

They were all light drinkers prior to the study. For every gram of alcohol per kilogram of body weight, they were also given one gram of fructose per kilogram of body weight, but not in the form of whole fruit.

Fructose shortened the time people felt drunk by about 30.7 percent and it helped their bodies clear alcohol from the bloodstream faster, speeding up the process by about 44.7 percent.

Alcohol is a toxin that depresses the parts of the brain needed to make decisions, assess situations, and coordinate our movements and reaction times.

When the body processes alcohol, a toxic substance called acetaldehyde is created.

Acetaldehyde is the main contributor to inflammation, dehydration and oxidative stress, leading to symptoms such as headaches, nausea and fatigue.

The dark circles on the graph represent blood alcohol levels measured every 10 minutes after subjects drank. A second experiment testing the effect of fructose on blood alcohol levels (shown by the open circles) showed that fructose affected the rate at which alcohol was metabolized and removed from the bloodstream.

Dr Patrick said: ‘Eating fruit with a meal before drinking can help reduce the negative effects. You can also do this by mixing alcohol with fruit juice, which also contains fructose.’

At the same time, she added a caveat to the choice of fruit cocktails: ‘This improved ability to process alcohol may come at a price.

‘Consuming alcohol and fructose at the same time actually made blood sugar and triglycerides (a type of fat in the blood) worse than consuming either alcohol or fructose alone.’

Another study, published in the South African Journal of Sciencetested the effects of consuming a concentrated amount of fructose in a glass of water before and after heavy drinking.

Researchers asked nine volunteer medical students and staff from an alcohol research institute to drink eight drinks of their choice within one hour.

Thirty minutes after they stopped, the researchers measured their blood alcohol levels until they reached zero.

A week later they repeated the same experiment, but this time 100 grams of fructose in water was given 20 minutes after drinking.

Adding fructose to the experiment reduced the time it took to reduce blood alcohol levels to below 50 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood (mg%) – the legal limit in South Africa – by about an hour and 10 minutes.

Next, they tested fructose as a hangover preventative. The volunteers took one gram of fructose per kilogram of body weight in water before drinking alcohol, which is the equivalent of a double shot of hard liquor – 50 milliliters – for five minutes.

After a waiting period of 10 minutes to allow the alcohol vapors in the mouth to evaporate, the breath alcohol content was measured until the alcohol content was zero.

Two volunteers were given two doses of 50 milliliters of whiskey. Their blood alcohol levels rose to about 40 mg% and then gradually fell back to zero over about two hours.

Researchers then gave the volunteers fructose before they drank the whiskey. This time, the increase in blood alcohol levels was significantly reduced.

In one participant, there was no detectable blood alcohol level. This suggests that either the alcohol was broken down very quickly, or that the fructose affected the alcohol metabolism, so that the blood alcohol level was not detectable at the time of measurement.

This also suggests that the fructose intervention may have suppressed potential hangovers.

In the second subject, the moderating effect on blood alcohol levels persisted even when they were given another 50 ml of whisky three hours later.