Humans have a long history with alcohol: we’ve been producing and consuming it for over ten thousand years, about as long as we’ve had agriculture.
It takes a long time for people to come up with all kinds of ideas about the drug and how it works. So it’s not surprising that some of them are wrong. Here are some common myths about alcohol, debunked by scientific research.
The order of your drinks doesn’t matter
You’ve probably heard some version of “beer before liquor has never been so sick” or “beer before wine and you’ll feel fine.” The basic idea is that you should stick to just one type of drink, or drink different drinks in a particular order, in order to avoid a hangover. The problem: No scientific research supports this claim.
The National Institution on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism considers alcohol consumption as a cause of hangovers to be a myth. “In general, the more alcohol a person drinks, the more severe the hangover will be,” they say on their website. “This is true whether a person drinks beer, wine, distilled spirits, or a combination thereof.”
Researchers from Witten/Herdecke University have published a paper specifically dedicated to this topic, conducting what may be the most German scientific study in history. They asked groups of people to drink beer then wine, or vice versa, alongside control groups who only drank one drink or the other. Then they invited the participants to another session, this time with wine then beer in reverse order, and compared the severity of the hangover. This led to many hangovers, although the order of drinks consumed had no real impact.
That doesn’t mean you can’t predict who will be hungover at a party. The study helpfully states that “subjective signs of progressive intoxication were confirmed to be accurate predictors of hangover severity.” It also includes what is perhaps the greatest sentence I have ever seen in a scientific study: “Multivariate regression analyzes revealed that drunkenness and vomiting were perceived to be the strongest predictors of hangover intensity.” »
Alcohol does not warm
You might feel a warm feeling after a drink – many people feel this and enjoy it. But that doesn’t mean alcohol makes you hot. This hot feeling is the feeling of heat leaving your body, which is not ideal. Dr. Krishna Vakharia, a UK-based physician, wrote an article explaining the effects of alcohol on body temperature, stating that although “red cheeks, sweating and hot flashes make us feel warmer, core body temperature actually drops.”
There is research that supports this. A 2005 study at the Center for Advanced Humanities Research at Waseda University in Japan concluded that alcohol actually lowers body temperature. Participants drank water or alcohol in a slightly warm room. “Skin blood flow and chest sweat rate during the drinking session were significantly increased compared with those of controls 10 minutes after drinking,” the study said. “Deep body temperature during the drinking session began to decrease 20 minutes after the onset of sweating and ultimately fell by 0.3°C compared to controls.”
That is, alcohol warms you up by releasing heat from your body. This warmth is exactly what you need to maintain in cold weather, so drinking isn’t a great way to stay warm. So much for these dogs with barrels of brandy around their necks.
Coffee doesn’t sober you up
Alcohol is the second most consumed drug in the world, behind caffeine. So it makes sense that there’s a common myth about the combination of the two: the idea that giving them coffee, or any other caffeinated beverage, can sober them up.
There is no truth in this idea. Caffeine may make you alert, but it does not counteract the effects of alcohol. A 2010 study conducted by the Boston University School of Public Health had 127 participants randomly consume one of four types of beer: non-alcoholic, with or without added caffeine, and alcoholic, with or without added caffeine. Participants then attempted to drive a simulated car.
The conclusion: “Adding caffeine to alcohol does not appear to improve driving or sustained attention/reaction performance compared to alcohol alone. » This is consistent with the broader scientific consensus. A cup of coffee can wake you up, even after a few drinks, but that doesn’t mean you’re sober. Only time can do that.
