So you hit the bottle a little too hard last night and have now awoken in a state of gut-rotting, head-pounding, agony. Standing before the fridge you pretend to be a doctor and judge which drink would be chemically most efficient to chug your way out of this stupor. Water? Coffee? Wheat tea?

Surprisingly, if you chose Sprite, you’d be correct. At least, that’s what a team of researchers at Zhongshan University decided after studying the effects of 57 different drinks against hangovers.

The study, which took place in Guangzhou, China, and must have included a fair bit of partying, gauged the effectiveness of a range of drinks in alleviating the symptoms of a hangover like nausea and headaches. Herbal drinks, teas, and carbonated beverages were among those tested.

A hangover can be attributed to a wide range of possible causes, one of which being the body’s process of breaking down alcohol in the body. When ingested, ethanol is broken down resulting in acetaldehyde. This is the chemical responsible for giving many East Asian people red faces while drinking. From there the acetaldehyde is broken down further, resulting in less harmful but possibly headache-inducing acetate.

The researchers suspect that something in Sprite causes this process to go more quickly which makes the symptoms of a hangover also come and go faster. What exactly it is in Sprite that does this has not been determined.

While this is far from definitive proof that Sprite is the miracle cure for a hangover, when the room is spinning it couldn’t hurt to try! Hopefully, the team at Zhongshan University can understand more about this connection, and most importantly: Why doesn’t 7-Up do the same thing?

Source: IroIro via Hachima Kiko (Japanese)
Image: Amazon