Bottoms up

Raw eggs, Guinness and pastrami can help your hangover, but don't mix them.

By Steven A. Shaw

Dec 29, 1999 | "Drink this," says Larry as I shakily accept a glass of viscous, mucus-colored, sulphur-scented goop. "It's the special family hangover cure: Raw eggs, lime jello and a touch of flat Guinness. It'll fix you right up, lad."

It doesn't, and I can't imagine that anything short of a bullet will cure this hangover. But that's the inevitable outcome when I go drink for drink with an Irishman.

Everybody's a hangover expert -- especially around holiday time -- and there's no shortage of folk remedies that people swear by, with each concoction more unpalatable than the last. So I decided to poll these self-appointed experts, and some real experts too, in the hopes of finding the truth about hangover cures.

Of course, we have a term for a person who has too much experience with hangovers: an alcoholic. But even a social (albeit not particularly sociable) drinker like the Fat Guy overdoes it once or twice every December. As long as major corporations continue to foster the great holiday-party tradition of free liquor, cute secretaries, horny bosses and bad food, and as long as people are driven to drink in order to dull the pain of awkward family gatherings, there will be overindulgence at Christmastime.

And on Jan. 1, 2000, we will be a hangover nation. I predict it will take days for us to realize we celebrated the millennium a year early.

Most of us know how a hangover feels. "The taste of dead cat in your mouth," "a stomach like a million roller coaster rides" and "like having a spike driven between your eyes" are just a few descriptions I heard bandied about by experienced drinkers. But what exactly is a hangover?

According to William Shoemaker, Ph.D., of the University of Connecticut Health Center (home to the federally-funded Alcohol Research Center), a hangover is a microcosm of addiction, withdrawal and recovery. "Just as alcoholics have severe withdrawal reactions when they stop drinking," he explains, "a hangover is a withdrawal reaction on a more modest scale."

In trying to find the best hangover remedies, I figured I'd talk to the people who drink the most -- and then I'd check the science with Shoemaker. The statistics tell us that the world leaders in alcohol consumption per capita are France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Switzerland and Spain. Primarily, with the exception of Germany, these countries are the leading per capita consumers of wine. The leading consumers of beer are Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark and Austria. Distilled spirit consumption is highest in Germany, the United States, Poland, Iceland, Sweden and France.

But when it comes to drunkenness (and its attendant hangovers), these statistics don't tell the whole story. The Italians may drink a lot of wine with meals, but as a culture they deplore drunkenness -- and everybody knows wine isn't a real drink. Conversely, even though Finland doesn't have particularly high per capita consumption, when the Finns go out to drink they do it right. This is the phenomenon of so-called "telescoped drinking," wherein people skew the statistics by spending their weeknights sober and then binging on weekends.

Americans do their fair share of drinking too, but we don't drink like we used to. As David F. Musto writes in Scientific American, "The young American ship of state floated on a sea of distilled spirits." Alcohol consumption, back in the day, was three times what it is now. But we've been fighting our way back, with steadily increasing consumption over the last 30 years.

There are also large parts of the world for which the statistics are unreliable. For example, a million statisticians couldn't convince me that the Swiss and Spanish drink more than the Russians. And don't even get me started on the Molson-guzzling Canadians, who have somehow managed once again to display a rosy image to the outside world (there's nothing worse than listening to a drunk Canadian recite the who's who of hoser comedy: "Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox, John Candy -- you know, they're all Canadians, eh?")

Next Page: The people who really know are the Irish

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