Ease your hangover with these foods
Slurping pickle juice, munching on a banana and consuming these three other foods might just be the answer to cure your hangover.
Describing a hangover as awful is a complete and utter understatement. For those who have suffered the consequences of a night out (most of us) will know that when suffering with that painful hangover, we’ll do about anything to get rid of it.
These five common foods/drinks are said to ease up that nasty hangover, according to Everyday Roots:
Remember to drink lots of water throughout your suffering!
1. Munch on a banana
Eating a banana is by not means a cure, but it will make you feel better when you wake up hung over. Bananas are rich in potassium. Alcohol suppresses vasopressin, which is responsible for controlling excessive urination-hence is why you always have to pee so much when you drink. When you pee, you lose, among other things, potassium. Without enough potassium, one tends to feel crabby and exhausted.
Avoid the big greasy breakfasts – all that’s going to do is give you heartburn. Your body needs good food so that it can make good energy to help heal itself. In saying this, too much greasy, rich food may just be the end all of you and lead you to feel even more ill.
Read also: Things you might not know about bananas
2. Oh, the glorious egg
Eggs are high in cysteine, which is a great substance for the metabolising of alcohol. Eating an egg or two will give your body an extra boost to get that wretched alcohol out of your system. How you decide to eat your eggs is purely personal preference.
Other foods that have cysteine include oats, broccoli, red peppers, and milk.
Check this one out: Why you should eat eggs everyday
3. Sweet like lemon and lime
Aside from being refreshing, lemon and lime juice are healing as well. These are two staples that you can turn to when you wake up with a churning stomach, as they work extremely effectively at quelling nausea and dizziness.
Because you want to be replenishing fluids, in the case of a hangover it’s good to go ahead and drink them with some water, rather than just inhaling the scent. How much lemon/lime you add is up to you. Drinking them squeezed in bubbly water versus tap water is said to be more beneficial, but not a necessity.
Not only when you’re hungover: Kickstart your day with lemon water
4. Slurp some pickle juice (yes the stuff left over from the jar)
A pounding headache is a classic hangover symptom. Pickle juice is salty, and while this may not sound appetising, your body needs salt after all of the fluids you lose when you drink and have to pee every five minutes. You’ll notice drinking some pickle juice will ease up that headache or take it away completely. Besides the salt, pickles are packed with sodium, and by eating them you’ll put some food in your belly.
5. Reach for the red
Lycopene is a red pigment that is responsible for giving certain fruits and vegetables their characteristic red to pink coloring. It is also one of the reasons tomatoes, or tomato juice, may help ease a hangover. Lycopene has been shown to have many positive effects on the liver in particular, and may help it process alcohol at a faster rate.
While it is present in other red/pink fruits and vegetables, such as grapefruit or papaya, pretty much all studies done on it deal with lycopene from tomatoes. When you wake up feeling nasty, throw back a glass of tomato juice.
Try this one: Spicy tomato soup
Keep in mind
How people are affected by alcohol varies hugely. Genetics, body mass and liver size all play a role. This is why using ‘how you can hold your liquor’ as a measure of social status is ridiculously ignorant.
Gender makes a difference as well. Drink-for-drink women have less acetaldehyde dehydrogenase and glutathione than men-even if the man and woman were of equal mass/size. Thus, womens hangovers tend to be worse, even if they drink less, because it takes that much longer to breakdown and process the alcohol.
Everyone is going to be a little different, and that’s that.
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