An Easy Way To Avoid A Hangover After a Holiday Party
Forget chugging pickle juice and popping B vitamins before you go to bed. There's another hangover prevention method that's been proven to work without putting anything new in your system.
Booze sales are way up this year, and if 2020 is driving you to drink, one new trick might help drive the alcohol out of your system before the headache sets in.
The liver has a big job to do on a daily basis ridding the body of toxins, and when it's suddenly flooded with alcohol it must seem like an insurmountable task. We might compare it to a deadline at work and suddenly a supervisor piles on two more stacks of papers to include. Thankfully, our livers don't throw a fit and resign.
The Toronto Star said researchers in Canada have learned that breathing hard can chase alcohol out of the system three times faster than the liver can. Seems easy!
My sister and I used to goof around when we were kids and take the deepest breath possible, then exhale for as long as we could, well past the point where it was comfortable until we were red in the face and it felt like there was not one bubble of air left in our lungs. Mom would always tell us to knock it off because we might pass out.
That's the fine line people were walking when they were trying to get the booze out of their system by breathing hard. Hyperventilating helps metabolize alcohol, but passing out is not the goal.
Hyperventilating can bring light-headedness, tingling in hands and feet, and fainting, but a new device can offer the exact amount of carbon dioxide needed to maintain normal levels in the blood and keep everything even keel all the way through. Canadian researchers came up with a method that delivers carbon dioxide to the patient through a mask to make sure they don't pass out. They said it's a very basic, low-tech device that could be made anywhere in the world, and it's a why-didn't-we-think-of-this-sooner type thing.
The study had "five volunteers each drink half a glass of vodka. Without the device, it took two to three hours for their bodies to clear the alcohol. On a separate day, the same five used the device and cleared the booze in 40 minutes while hyperventilating."
It seems like breathing hard might come naturally to tipsy people, along with belly laughs that go on a little too long, so this may be an easy exercise to work into the next Tito's adventure. Something to consider at an upcoming holiday party. Or Thanksgiving. Or heck, just Tuesday. Let me know how it goes.