We’ve all heard the saying “wine before beer, you should fear; beer before wine, you’ll feel fine” – but it turns out they’re not words to live by.
It doesn’t matter how you order your drinks, if you drink too much, you’re still going to get a hangover, according to a new study. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, gave 90 volunteers the tough job of boozing on beer and wine in different orders.
The result? 90 hungover people and our dreams squashed forever.
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The volunteers, aged between 19 and 40 years old, were recruited and split into three groups. The first group consumed two and a half pints of beer followed by four large glasses of wine.
The second group consumed the same amount of alcohol, but in reverse order. Those in the third, control group consumed either only beer or only wine.
One week later, participants in groups one and two were switched to the opposite drinking order to add an extra layer of reliability to the findings.
Control group subjects who drank only beer the first time around received only wine on the second study day (and vice versa). This way, the groups were not only compared to each other, but each participant was their own control, too.
Participants were asked about their wellbeing at regular intervals while drinking, and were also asked to judge their perceived level of drunkenness on a scale of 0 and 10 at the end of each study day.
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Before going to bed at the study site (must have been the weirdest party, ever), all participants received an individualised amount of drinking water tailored to their body weight. They were then kept under medical supervision overnight.
The following day, participants were asked about their hangover and given a score from 0-56 (the so-called Acute Hangover Scale) based on factors including thirst, fatigue, headache, dizziness, nausea, stomach ache, increased heart rate and loss of appetite.
The researchers found that none of the three groups had a significantly different hangover score with different orders of alcoholic drinks, but women did tend to have slightly worse hangovers than men.
“Using white wine and lager beer, we didn’t find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around,” study author Jöran Köchling, from Witten/Herdecke University, commented.
“The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover. The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you’ll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick. We should all pay attention to these red flags when drinking.”