The holiday – drinking – season is upon everyone. Is it the most wonderful time of the year for a meat product promising to prevent hangovers and their painful, productivity-wounding effects?
Among the most recent “miracle cures” introduced in 2015 is a meat treat from Serious Pig, a craft meat firm based in Peckham in southeast London. Dubbed as “the world’s first hangover-preventing meat treat,” the snack “Hangover Cured” claims it can stop hangover in its tracks.
“Hangover Cured” is a high-protein sausage snack with added chili and ginger. Its makers said that one can eat it while drinking to reap its supposed properties against nausea and fatigue – two of the usual symptoms of having too much alcohol intake.
Hangovers are now estimated to cost businesses nearly £260 million ($390.8 million), with both pharmaceutical companies and innovative startups aiming to offer preventatives and partake in the huge market. So-called super-vitamin pills, for instance, are said to be taken before alcohol intake in order to counteract the damage of the substance.
But some experts aren’t all that impressed – or blown away by the novel food concept.
“While it is a good idea to eat food, and not drink on an empty stomach, I think there might be healthier options,” warned Charlotte Stirling-Read, a nutritionist at the Association for Nutrition.
Stirling-Read said that one source of hangover symptoms is inflammation, which is a response of the body to too much alcohol. This makes vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants potentially beneficial and cell-protective.
The expert, however, is skeptical that the meat product can offer the same results. “I’m not sure they are likely – or that there is any evidence for this – to ‘prevent’ a hangover,” she said.
Not even soluble rehydration tablets get the nod from Stirling-Read, whose effects she likened to sipping water and “eating some fresh fruit and nibbling some dry crackers.”
The real solution, she reminded, is pretty simple and straightforward: just abstain from alcohol.
Photo: Doug Bowman | Flickr
