I remember reading that there isn’t anything that can get alcohol out of the bloodstream until it goes away by itself. Is this true? Or do things like Chaser™ actually work?
I don’t know about the specific pill you mention, but anti-hangover pills in general have stuff like aspirin, caffeine and other stuff that help digestion (alka-seltzer style). Their intention is not to lower your BAC (so, for example you could drive a car legaly). It’s for the morning-after, when you feel totaly wasted. It makes you feel a little better.
Apparently, the best way to prevent hangovers is to rehydrate yourself before you go to sleep. Drink plenty of gatorate, pedialite, or failing that, water. Its a better idea to stop it before it starts rather than wake up in the morning and needing to take a bunch of pills.
The product the OP is referring to is meant to be taken while you are drinking. (Hence the name).
It’s supposed to prevent hangovers, not cure them, by absorbing the toxins and sulfites that supposedly cause some hangover symptoms. It makes no claims as to actually absorbing the alcohol.
I doubt it works much better than drinking a couple of big glasses of water before going to sleep.
Well, since alcohol is the toxin that causes hangovers…
The only sure-fire hangover prevention is alcohol moderation (stop at two drinks of any alcoholic beverage).
Peace.
I’d dispute this. For example, Icehouse (they still make that?) used to give me wicked hangovers. Same quantity or more of good old Blue wouldn’t effected me the next morning. Some tequilas make me feel like crap the next day, and some don’t bug me at all. No, there’s gotta be more to it than the alcohol.
Oh, there’s lots more to it than just the ethanol. There’s the methyl alcohol, the esters, the organic acids, the aldehyde compounds, The higher alcohols (that sounds like a good thing but it’s not), the histamines, and a variety of other trace organic toxins that are the result either of fermentation, distillation, or the body’s metabolism of the ingested beverage.
Some alcoholic drinks contain more congeners than others; some people tolerate certain trace substances better than others; some people metabolize the different complex beverages better or worse than others.
Want to be sure of avoiding hangovers? The best way is to not drink alcohol. The next best way is to drink in moderation. The next best way is to push electrolyte rich fluids and take appropriate analgesics before calling it a night.
Been discussed before here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=251157&highlight=hangover+pills