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Do anti-hangover pills, like Chaser, actually work?

Do seatbelts work? Don’t know if I’d say they “work”, so much as they help. I’d liken them to a bicycle helmet. If you’re going to crash into a wall, you’ll be better off wearing one, but that’s no guarantee you’ll feel perfectly fine the next day.

Let’s stop for a moment and talk about the hangover — a catch-all term used to describe any number of problems that arise from a night of heavy drinking:

• After several hours of intoxication, your brain develops a temporary dependency on alcohol, resulting in a painful withdrawal when (if?) you stop drinking the next morning.
• Unless you’ve been drinking nothing but clear liquor and soda water, you’ve likely taken in an ungodly amount of sugar along with the alcohol. Once that sugar is gone, your body experiences a sugar crash.
• Alcohol, in any form, pulls water out of your body in an attempt to clear your system, which can leave you moderately to severely dehydrated if you haven’t taken in enough water while drinking.
• After a night of drinking, your body devotes all its resources to processing the alcohol and detoxifying your system — which means your body will ignore any other things it may need to heal (like sore arms from a heavy workout at the gym.)
• Cogeners in the alcohol can cause headaches and nausea. Cogeners, a byproduct of the fermentation process, are trace amounts of chemicals like methanol and acetone. They’re (clearly) toxic, and are only removed through natural dissipation over time or through the fractional distillation/filtration process that creates vodka and gin. (Some whiskeys, like Jameson or Jack Daniels, are filtered as well.) Fractional distillation chemically separates ethanol from the other chemicals, and filtration passes the liquor through activated carbon — charcoal, basically, just like the pitcher that filters your water. (Which means yes, if you run cheap vodka through a Brita filter, it will get a bit better.)

So, what can anti-hangover pills do for any of that? Well, here are the main ingredients for Chaser, one of the more popular pills out there: vegetable carbon and activated calcium carbonate. They’re intended to absorb the cogeners just like a filter would. Chaser also includes several remedies to treat the symptoms of your hangover. The directions  indicate you should take a dose when you start drinking,  then every few hours after. They also include (conveniently) a large glass of water with each dose.

Do they work?  They certainly might help. But do you need them? No. Drink plenty of water between your drinks, and make sure you’ve got caffeine and ibuprofen on hand for the next morning (along with, of course, more water.) The caffeine will help with the headache and the  ibuprofen will further help to ease your pain. If you want to absorb the cogeners, a burnt piece of toast will have the exact same effect as the Chaser pills. And if you’re suffering from a sugar crash, I like those Emergen-C vitamin packs you stir into water. They’re designed as a vitamin boost for sick people, but they’ll make you feel better the morning after, too.