The Hindu Business Line : Nursing a hangover

The dosa crisping to a nice golden brown on the breakfast pan sounds like a Diwali firebomb. The beautiful sunshine flooding the room hits your eyes like stinging lather. Your head pounds. Heart hammers. Oesophagus heaves. Tongue is furred. Throat is raspy dry. Phew! There is no doubt about it. Last night's drinking binge is this morning's hellish hangover.

As with many afflictions, time — 24 hours of it — is a hangover's best healer. Ah, but you've got to get through the next eight hours at work as painlessly and smoothly as possible, right? Here's how you can help yourself.

Have coffee: If a regular coffee drinker, have two morning cups of coffee. Coffee reduces the swollen blood vessels that are causing your headache. Plus, its rich, familiar, aromatic taste provides comfort to your disoriented senses.

Juice up: If you aren't a coffee drinker, treat yourself to a large glass of fresh orange juice. If it gives you a sore throat, opt for tomato juice. Fresh juices contain the natural sugar fructose that burns booze pretty speedily and replaces depleted sugar in the blood.

Breakfast on bananas: Place a peeled banana on your dosa and douse it with honey. Roll the dosa and eat it. Or put chopped banana, honey and raisins in cold milk and have it. The banana boosts B vitamins and potassium both of which get depleted by alcohol. The honey-banana-raisin trio teems with concentrated fructose-reserves that further flush out maximum alcohol. Milk soothes the stomach.

Relieve pain: If your headache persists, swallow an aspirin or ibuprofen — after breakfast, never on an empty stomach.

Hail a cab: Don't drive to work even if you feel you've recovered miraculously. A Swedish study tested 22 volunteers. Each candidate drove a station wagon on a pylon-peppered course. At unpredictable signals, they had to swerve right, swerve left, brake, without knocking down the pylons. When sober, all 22 passed the test. When hung-over yet "feeling fine", 19 of the 22 fared miserably. The lesson here: hail a cab and save a life. It could be yours.

Eat well: If your stomach can stand it, eat a balanced lunch — dal, rice, sabzi and yoghurt. They provide the depleted proteins, carbohydrates and vitamins that your alcoholised body sorely needs. Avoid fats, fries, pickles — they could be tough on your tender oesophagus.

Drink water: The more water you drink and expel, the more alcohol you flush out of your system. Go for at least two litres.

Head to bed: Don't work late. Don't accept an invitation to a late-night movie. Give your system a break. Go home. If you're feeling up to it, take an evening walk and get some fresh air. Enjoy nature's splendid serenity. Then, have a hot meal. Get a full night's sleep. By next morning, your hangover should be history and you should be back to your normal cheerful self. The week flies by. The weekend beckons. Ah, but you don't want a replay of that hell. You wonder... can you prevent a hangover?

Yes, with these measures:

Eat to drink: Think of a drink more as a digestive, a dash to be taken after food. Eat a proper meal. Food is a beautiful buffer. It slows the body's pace of alcohol absorption. Less booze reaches the brain and considerably reduces the chance of a hangover.

Space your sips: Drink water to slake your thirst and prevent yourself from gulping down your party peg. Sip a fruit juice in between your alcohol drinks. Or sip your drink very, very slowly. Your body burns only an ounce of alcohol per hour. And these tortoise-paced tipples ensure that alcohol doesn't stay in your bloodstream.

Avoid bubblies: Don't mix alcohol with soda or fizzy soft drinks. Bubbles usher alcohol into your bloodstream far too quickly. Your liver, which processes 28 grams an hour, cannot keep pace. So, mix with water and ice.

Be fussy: If you are headache-prone, be very fussy about what you drink. Doctors suspect `congeners'— other kinds of alcohols beside ethanol (which gives you that high) like methanol, acetone — as the culprits that grip your head in a vise. Apparently, vodka has less congeners than cognac, brandy, whisky, champagne and is a safer bet. However, I don't support this theory. My wife had intense three-day headaches with vodka. She tried wine only to find out that its tyramine-content causes headaches too. Ultimately, she got so `fussy', she turned teetotaller!

Say `No': Remember, if you have an important client meeting, interview, project presentation or seminar the next day, say "no" to booze the night before. It ensures peak performance instead of a woozy one. And if you want to prevent that pernicious headache but have a persistent host insisting you have "just one drink", do what my wise wife does. She taps her head and says deadpan, "Kidneys."

Sobriety does not mean you lose your sense of humour!

(The writer is co-author of the book `Fitness for Life'.)

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