Spinning the Science
Educating students about responsible alcohol use is a necessary component to prevention campaigns. Often times, students report marked misperceptions regarding alcohol use; therefore, recognizing such untruths and providing reliable information to students regarding the “fact behind the fiction” can draw attention to the healthy, safe, and responsible decision a student can face if and when they choose to engage in alcohol consumption. At the University of Missouri-Columbia, the MU Mythbusters campaign does exactly that. By providing students with alternative explanations and additional information to commonly held alcohol myths, students are drawn to the truth regarding their own misconceptions about alcohol use in order to decrease high risk drinking behaviors.For example, students report believing that drinking coffee or taking a cold shower is a great way to sober up quickly. However, MU Mythbusters draws its readers to consider the truth that nothing will sober someone up except the passage of time. Although coffee may make you feel more alert, it will not make you sober. In the much the same way, a cold shower may wake you up, but it will still not reduce the level of alcohol in your bloodstream.
Additionally, MU Mythbusters provides students other important things to consider regarding the body’s ability to become sober. Although nothing will work to cure a hangover but time, there are many important things to consider before a student decides to drink that can affect how the body reacts to the alcohol.
1. Alcohol absorption can be slowed by keeping it in your stomach for as long as possible. Slower absorption can be achieved by eating a small meal before consuming alcohol, especially if that meal includes fat, which has shown to be more efficient at preventing absorption.
2. Avoiding drinks containing congeners, which are found in dark colored drinks, is another helpful practice to consider. These drinks produce more hangovers than white wine and vodka and have been shown to strengthen the effect of the hangover and also cause additional stomach irritation.
3. It is important to note that women may be more likely to be affected by a hangover because of their higher body fat percentage and because women are typically smaller in size.
4. Always keep in mind that drinking on an empty stomach will intensify the possibility of having a hangover. Also, sipping a drink instead of “slamming it down” will allow the liver to detoxify the alcohol at a reasonable rate. Rotating alcoholic drinks with soda or water will prevent dehydration and the headache that may set in the day after drinking. By counteracting the dehydrating effects of alcohol, water lessens hangover symptoms, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, who reviewed multiple studies published between 1966 and 1999 (Retzlaff, 2005).
5. Lastly, it is important to understand that hangovers affect mental function. “Studies on the cognitive function of volunteers with experimentally induced hangover state showed that higher cortical (memory and intellectual) and visual functions were impaired (Williams, 2005).”When tacking the myth of coffee and showers as they relate to how quickly someone is able to sober up, one major truth remains clear: the more intoxicated you are, the more time you will need to sober up. This could take several hours depending on how much you have had to drink and how quickly you consumed the alcohol. So by all means, take a cold shower or drink all the coffee you want, but only time will tell when you are sober.
Author Leigh Neier is a PhD Candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and serves as a Prevention Graduate Assistant for the Wellness Resource Center.
Check out other MU Mythbusters at: http://wellness.missouri.edu/Mythbusters/. MU Mythbusters is funded by a Model Program Grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.
Sources:
Williams, Nerys. (2005). Pulse, 65(49), 33.
Retzlaff, Kimberly J. (2005). Better Nutrition, 67(12).
