"Beer before wine and you'll feel fine."
These seven words are practically our mantra on a Saturday night out - but unfortunately for all of us who enjoy a tipple, it seems that it might not actually be true.
A recent study looked into whether the order of your drinks has an effect on the magnitude of your hangover. And, news flash: if you drink too much alcohol, you will be hungover no matter what.
While this revelation may seem obvious to some, to other drinkers who relied on the idea that if they played their cards right with the order of their alcoholic bevvies, they could avoid 24 hours of torture the next day, it's fairly devastating news.
The study saw researchers ply 90 volunteers with beer and white wine to order to settle the debate once and for all. Those who partook were aged 19 to 40 and were given a standardised meal tailored to their individual energy requirements, then split into three groups.
The first group drank about two and a half pints of lager followed by four large glasses of white wine. The second had the same drinks but in reverse order, while the third and final group had beer or wine up to the same breath alcohol concentration. Every volunteer drank up to 0.11 per cent, so they would have the same alcohol level in their systems.
Throughout the night, researchers monitored and quizzed the participants on how drunk they felt. Then, before bedtime, each person was given a glass of water, the size depending on their body weight.
After a night under medical supervision, they were asked to rate how awful their hangovers were and scored on the acute hangover scale, which takes into account factors including thirst, fatigue, headache, dizziness.
The next morning was seemingly vomit-filled, with those who threw up the ones most likely to rate their hangover as severe. Urgh - we've all been there!
After a week to get over their headaches, the volunteers returned and did it all again. This time, however, the people who drank beer before wine on their first visit started on the wine, and vice versa. In addition, those who had drunk only beer were given wine and vice versa again.
The results, published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that there was no difference in the intensity of a hangover brought on by drinking wine first followed by beer, or the other way around.
Speaking about the study, Kai Hensel, a senior clinical fellow at Cambridge University, one of the researchers involved, confirmed that drink order had no effect on your sore head the next morning.
"Everyone knows the saying, “beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer," he said. "We thought there must be something in it, how can we test it? We debunked the saying, it’s not true. You’re going to be the same whatever order you drink these beverages in."
He made it clear, however, that the study only compared beer with white wine, and did not include red wine, spirits or dark beers.
"The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover," added Jöran Köchling, the first author on the study from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. "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."
So, there you have it, folks. If you do the crime, you do the time! Gutted.
