Why do some people get hangovers and others don't?
It is well known that people not only get drunk, but also move away from violent libations in different ways. Someone mercilessly mixes different alcoholic drinks, drinks cocktails and almost never eats. However, in the morning he wakes up only slightly rumpled. And someone even after a few glasses in the morning experiences terrible sensations: nausea, headache, dizziness and general depression. Why are hangovers so different?
When a person drinks, alcohol enters his bloodstream. It circulates with it throughout the body, but most of all it is concentrated in the brain. To protect vital organs from the toxin, the liver produces the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase. It plays a decisive role in the onset of intoxication.
In men, some of this enzyme is already present in the stomach, but in women it is not. Therefore, as a rule, the stronger sex gets drunk more slowly than the weak. Part of the alcohol is neutralized in the digestive system of men and does not enter the bloodstream. But women fully experience the effect of alcohol on the body, since their reaction occurs later. Hangovers also get worse with age, and scientists have explained why.
In the body, ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde (acetic aldehyde). It is to this compound that we should be “thankful” for such a phenomenon as a hangover. But our body has a remedy for this poison, and it is called aldehyde dehydrogenase. True, not everyone produces this enzyme in sufficient quantities. We can say that the owners of a good production of this substance won the genetic lottery. That is, the ability to resist a hangover is innate in them.
Cunning doctors use the substance disulfiram when coding for alcoholism. It blocks the release of aldehyde dehydrogenase and therefore even the most resistant begin to experience a terrible hangover after a small amount of alcohol. Of course, few people want to experience again and again the terrible sensations of a full-blown "hangover" and, thus, an aversion to alcohol is developed.
Despite advances in medicine, science has yet to come up with an effective hangover cure. There are remedies that can only alleviate the condition or remove individual symptoms. If someone invented pills for the breakdown of acetaldehyde in the blood, then he would certainly go down in history. So the only effective way to avoid a hangover is moderation in quantity and legibility in alcoholic beverages.