Boozeflash! Lining your abdomen to keep away from a hangover would not work

Planning to offset a festive hangover by lining your stomach before you drink? You might end up disappointed – and with a nasty dose of clinophilia or strong determination to stay in bed, instead.

Academics have found that – contrary to popular belief – eating before you start boozing does not protect you from an alcohol-induced headache.

Scientists at a Spanish university studied 32 people, who each went out drinking three times, to identify the most common symptoms of a hangover.

They also looked at whether their behaviour while drinking had any effect on how they felt the next day. 

Unsurprisingly, more than half of these drinking sessions resulted in headaches – but eating a meal beforehand, or eating while drinking alcohol, made no difference at all, they found.

In one particularly groundbreaking finding, the researchers noted the most common morning-after symptom was thirst, which was experienced by virtually every boozer. ‘Prolonged’ thirst was associated with headaches.

The second most common symptom was a blocked or runny nose, followed by hunger. These were followed by photophobia – a fear of light – and phonophobia, a fear of noise. 

Subjects also experienced asthenia – a lack of energy – in nine out of ten cases.

File image: Academics have found that – contrary to popular belief – eating before you start boozing does not protect you from an alcohol-induced headache

And clinophilia, sometimes called ‘staying-in-bed syndrome’, was another strong theme among 88.5 per cent of the hungover participants in the study.

Hearteningly, eating before going to bed did appear to slightly shorten the duration of hangover symptoms the next morning – although the scientists, from Spain’s Universidad de Valladolid, cautioned that their finding was not ‘statistically significant’.

Writing about their study in the medical science journal Life, they said: ‘It is a common belief that some factors, such as proper hydration or food consumption, may prevent the incidence of headaches following alcohol consumption; however, this has not been demonstrated with scientific evidence.

‘We tried to validate the popular belief that eating in conjunction with alcoholic beverages may minimize the odds of having a hangover; however, our findings did not support this.’