A Good Hangover Cure – What Remedy Really Works?

A good hangover cure is the key difference between having a productive, relatively painless and even enjoyable day and having a grim, wasteful and useless day in bed with severe pain and nausea.

So how do you get relief fast and even better, avoid medication that could be bad for your liver?

And how do you boost your body’s natural ability to get rid of a hangover faster for the next time?

These tips and techniques can help you.

1. Prevent hangovers using a vitamin kit

Preventing hangovers is much, much more effective than desperately trying to find a good hangover cure the next morning when you’re already in severe pain and trying not to vomit.

Did you know you could do this? As long as you don’t do anything silly like binge drinking, mixing your drinks or gulping down too much low grade alcohol, then this preventative remedy works around 9 times out of 10.

How do you do it?

When you drink plenty of alcohol, your body is losing essential vitamins and minerals. Alcohol is a diuretic which means it causes you to expel liquid from your body at a faster rate than you would do normally.

The trick is for you to replace these vitamins and minerals (known as electrolytes) as they leave your body.

How do you do this?

You take a multivitamin pill right after drinking and before sleeping.

A great hangover prevention pill is PreToxx for Hangovers, which has a slow release so it works throughout the night, while you sleep.

Pretoxx is specifically designed for preventing hangovers and I can recommend it.

The results? When you take a couple of these after drinking and before sleeping, you’ll wake up more or less clear headed.

You won’t feel perfect. Your body may still feel a bit tired. But your head should be clear and more alert, with no headache or nausea. You’ll definitely feel much better than if you don’t take the tablets.

Remember to have a big glass of water with your vitamins too, to help to rehydrate your body.

2. Ibuprofen hangover remedy

Normally I’d advise against taking painkillers to cure hangovers. I prefer to recommend only natural hangover remedies and nothing else.

But I understand that some hangovers are just too severe and many people have to be active the next day. Some of you have to work and may have an important day. Others may just be in unbearable pain.

What do you do when you feel this way?

First of all, never take painkillers right after drinking. Mixing medication with alcohol has health risks and your body may react badly to it.

Only take painkillers if you wake up in severe pain and you need to get rid of your headache and nausea very fast.

You can take Ibuprofen to block the pain and reduce the nausea, while you recover from your hangover by drinking plenty of liquid and eating food such as eggs (beneficial to your liver) and toast (starch that raises your blood sugar level) with honey (fructose that processes your hangover faster).

It’s also recommended to get some exercise (walking and fresh air) to improve blood circulation.

Most people report that Advil is highly effective.

Regardless of which brand you choose, you can take your pills with flat cola, fruit juice or simply water.

3. Eggs and bacon

Food is a good hangover cure that works.

Generally for the moderate level of hangover, food can bring you back to life by raising your blood sugar level, diluting the level of alcohol in your blood and helping your body metabolise the alcohol faster.

The question is, which food?

Don’t eat too much when you’re hungover. You may feel starving, but eating plates of carbs and french fries can cause you to slump into a digestive meltdown. You’ll feel slow, lethargic and not really much better than before.

Ideally, you need eggs for their cysteine, which helps to clean up the toxins your body is processing (acetaldahyde).

You need some toast to provide the starch that will raise your blood sugar level and cause you to feel more energetic and less lethargic.

You need bacon to provide you with amino acids that help your brain to function better.

That’s why toast, eggs and bacon is an excellent hangover remedy. 

Need more hangover food? Go here

4. Drinks to help hangover recovery

Certain drinks are great for accelerating our recovery from a bad hangover.

Whether you’ve taken a painkiller to block your headache and nausea or not, drinks are your best way to rehydrate your body, process your hangover faster and flush out the alcohol.

Water on its own may help when you’re badly hungover, but it’s not quite enough.

Ideally, you should knock back a big tomato juice with salt and pepper. This can be very effective at fixing a bad hangover in a short term.

Cola is fairly effective too, rehydrating your body and raising your blood sugar level.

Gatorade or its equivalent is an even better way to replace lost electrolytes and to boost your recovery rate fast. 

Gatorade for hangovers 

A full list of hangover drinks that work

5. Home remedies for hangovers

Why venture out into the street when the shops may be closed and when you feel as rough as a badger?

You may even have a good hangover cure at home, in your kitchen cupboard.

Home remedies are not just food, drink and natural remedies around your house but they are also what you do with yourself.

Playing golf, taking a walk, taking deep breaths of fresh air, having sex, drinking tea with honey…any combination of these can help you beat a moderate hangover. 

Go here for all the hangover home remedies

Hangover Cures To Avoid

Just like with anything, there are plenty of myths that circulate about curing hangovers.

Having tested each and every one, I can confirm that none of these really work. Or if they do appear to work, they are pretty bad for your health.

1. Tylenol or Paracetomol

I’ve seen people claiming that taking Tylenol, or Paracetomol (also known as Acetaminophen) is a good hangover cure.

Some people even have 2 x 500mg tablets right after drinking heavily.

Let me warn you that this is a huge mistake. Acetaminophen is broken down by the liver and adds an additional load on the liver.

People who take too much of it in a short time can end up with liver damage.

Even the FDA report the liver damage that it can cause.

2. Coffee

Whoever claims that coffee cures hangovers has never really been hungover.

Yes a strong espresso clears your head if you had a few drinks and went to bed late.

But for real hangovers, coffee doesn’t help at all.

It tightens your headache, appears to dehydrate you even more and finally, leaves you irritable and unable to get back to sleep.

People who recommend that coffee fixes you up mean well, but they don’t know what they’re talking about.

3. Hair of the dog

I know hair of the dog as a hangover cure is fun when you’re being a bit young and carefree.

After all, I’ve done it myself before.

Does it work? It appears to work for an hour or two. Then your hangover just hits in again, but slower and for longer.

Getting rid of a hangover is about processing it from your body faster than you would otherwise and replacing what you lost.

It’s not about giving it more of what makes it hurt.

Avoid hair of the dog. 

More on why hair of the dog doesn’t work

4. Not drinking to avoid hangovers

We’ve all heard this utter garbage from people claiming they know all about hangovers.

“The only way to avoid a hangover is to abstain from drinking.”.

Yawn.

The whole point in finding a good hangover cure is because you’re a drinker. You like a drink. You go to parties, you relax with a drink.

So if you’re looking for a good hangover cure, the very last thing you want to hear is some spod who thinks he knows it all telling you not to drink.

Someone needs to drop kick these people off the field. They clearly don’t know anything. Some of them are even paid to not know anything.

They are the same people who’ll tell you “no scientific evidence exists for bla bla bla..”

Just because no evidence exists for a remedy, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

We know what works for us, we don’t need some geek in a laboratory telling us about how useless evidence proves everything in the world.

Someone recommending that you don’t drink to avoid hangovers is the very last one you want to hear when you wake up hungover.

You’ve already been drinking, so this advice is utterly pointless and useless.

So anyone who says it should be deleted, ignored and avoided forever.

What do you think? Are these people 2 cans short of a 6 pack or am I harsh on them? I think I’m being soft on them actually. But that’s just me. Leave me a comment below.