Everyone has a story of picking a fight with a particular liquor -- I've yet to hear one in which the drinker defeats the bottle. But if you were to take a straw poll of those battles, you'd likely discover that, more often than not, when it comes to hangovers, darker liquors are to blame.
In a recent study conducted by the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, consuming bourbon apparently led to a more severe hangover than vodka.
The culprit are congeners -- the substances that ultimately impart flavor to alcohol during the production process. Congeners are found in greater concentration in darker spirits (rum, whiskey) than in lighter spirits (vodka, gin). Don't expect this revelation to be the key to
curing hangovers, though, because -- like the friend who always orders one round too many -- the congeners are mostly just adding to pain that is already there:
Bourbon does make people feel somewhat worse, but the bourbon isn't the whole story, says lead study author Damaris Rohsenow. "Bourbon jacks it up a bit, but the increase in how sick people feel is not enough to affect their performance."According to the study, drinkers were 2 percent slower than those who didn't drink when asked to complete a series of tasks the next day. That number is not as bad as I would have expected considering how one traditionally feels when battling a hangover. That might be because the study participants averaged a blood-alcohol content level of 0.1 percent, and most nights that result in hangovers involve significantly more alcohol.
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