Interesting Facts About Hangovers

8 Interesting Facts About Hangovers

1. Smoking can make hangovers worse: Not only are cigarettes bad for your overall health, they can make your hangover that much worse the next morning.
   Researchers who looked at the smoking and drinking habits of college students found that those who smoked on the nights that they drank heavily had much more severe hangovers the following day.
2. Hangovers are expensive: While hangovers can take a toll on individuals, they can also affect the economy. It's estimated that hangovers cost $148 billion annually, with an average annual cost of $2,000 per working adult, due to missing work and poor job performance, according to a 2000 study in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
3. Darker liquors can cause worse hangover symptoms: Darker-hued drinks, such as bourbon, red wine and rum can often be the culprit of a brutal hangover, thanks to high concentrations of compounds called congeners. These byproducts of fermentation get metabolized by the body into formaldehyde, a highly toxic substance that can contribute to a person's overall misery during a hungover morning
4. Genetics plays a role: Hangover symptoms are closely tied to how efficiently the body breaks down alcohol and its byproducts. Certain genes are directly responsible for key enzymes, such as aldehyde dehydrogenase, which breaks down the toxic alcohol byproduct acetaldehyde.
5. Snacking on protein can help: A hangover prevention plan, Schaefer said, can include "grazing on protein snacks. Protein keeps the stomach busy."
   Because they take a relatively long time to digest, protein-rich foods such as meat, nuts and cheese will delay the opening of the pyloric valve, which allows the stomach's contents to pass into the small intestine. The small intestine is where most alcohol is absorbed into the blood.
6. Carbonated beverages make hangovers worse: Beer and champagne drinkers take note — the bubbles in your beverage can contribute to a hangover's severity.
   
   "If you drink bubbly drinks, [the gas] causes your pyloric valve to open," Schaefer said.
   Thus, bubbly alcohol is more likely to quickly reach the small intestine, from where it is swiftly taken up into the bloodstream. Higher blood alcohol content is more likely to lead to intense hangover symptoms in the morning, so, Schaefer advised drinking "alcohol on the rocks with water as a chaser."
7. Your brain is dehydrated: That signature, pounding headache of an epic hangover is due to dehydration. Specifically, "ethanol dries out your brain," Schaefer said.
   
   Alcohol does this by suppressing the hormone argenine vasopressin, which conserves water levels in the body. Without argenine vasopressin there to regulate things, more water gets lost in urine, causing the body's water levels to drop.
8. Women have a higher risk of hangovers than men: The body's water content is to blame for a woman's more potent hangover. While all humans are roughly 80 percent water, this varies between the sexes. As a percentage, women have less body water due the fact that they have more body fat (which holds less water) while men have more muscle (which is made up mostly of water).

 SOURCE: 

http://www.livescience.com/36934-interesting-facts-hangovers-causes-prevention.html