Hangovers 101: A Caffeinated Vitamin and Smoothie
Jun 07, 2018
This week, I’m taking you all waaaay back to my good old college days
…when even the worst of hangovers was less than a 24 hour affair. Remember those? My 30-something-year-old self says: hahahahahahahaha. Time is a bitter pill to swallow.
Speaking of pills, I do remember one particularly bad hangover from my early twenties. I had slept in my car and had to work at nine o’clock the next morning selling shoes. PLEASANT. My coworker, who I can only assume was tired of my groaning, offered to fix me his tried-and-true Hangover Cure. After his break, he produced a food court fruit smoothie and a caffeinated multi-vitamin. Which I ingested with a small amount of trepidation.
And you know what? About an hour later, I felt 100% better. Good, even. It was an honest-to-God overindulgence miracle.
The Science
The science actually makes a whole lot of sense. The fruit smoothie is chock-full of all the things that make fruit a good dietary choice: vitamins, minerals, antioxidants. Plus all that crushed ice is cool, soothing, and hydrating. The multivitamin is full of, well, vitamins. And the added caffeine does a whole lot of things. Since caffeine stimulates the central nervous system, you’ll notice that you feel more awake, alert, and aware. Three things that are not commonly experienced during a state of hangover. Caffeine also gets your heart pumping faster, so all the goodies from the smoothie and the vitamin get where they are going a little bit faster. Sounds like a pretty solid hangover cure, right?
But Does a Caffeinated Vitamin Smoothie Combo Work?
Kinda, yeah. The summer when I sold shoes, my coworker supplied me with many of these cures. And for the most part, I was able to make it work. That is, I showed up to work hungover and didn’t want to die by the end of the day (I don’t recommend this, by the way. I was not a model employee). It was only more recently, when I revisited this cure for the blog that I began to notice some holes.
Here’s How it Went Down at Our House…
The first problem was finding caffeinated vitamins.
I figured GNC would have something like this. After all, there was a GNC around the corner from the smoothie stand at the mall. That’s probably where the vitamins came from, right?
Who knows. This was 15 years ago. That coworker is long gone (I can’t even remember his name), as is the smoothie stand, and the shoe store where we worked, and I have no way to track him down and find out what the vitamin was. Plus, that would be weird.
As for GNC…they have caffeine in pill form. They have vitamins out the ying-yang. But they do not have caffeinated vitamins. So there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about this portion. I got caffeine in a pill form as well as a well-reviewed multivitamin and called it good enough. The fruit smoothie I made at home, because that is definitely something that grown-ups do.
The second problem was that I am not 22 anymore.
You know that first time you fall down and realize you’re getting old? Maybe you slip on ice, or miss a step on your staircase, and it just hurts a lot more than you remember. And it takes three times as long to get back up and you DEFINITELY groan and grunt the entire time. Well, for me, this is what drinking-in-my-30’s is like. Gone are the days of powering through a hangover. Even well-equipped with the best of hangover-combating techniques, it is an all-day (and sometimes multi-day) affair. I didn’t feel my worst this time around, but I also certainly didn’t feel my best.
Looking at our scale where 10 is “works like a charm” and 1 is “I feel worse now than ever,” I give this Hangover Cure a 7. That’s like a solid B plus. Way to go!
Check back for our final installment of the Hangover 101 series. Have a hangover cure that works for you? Let us know!
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