One night you go out for drinks with a much younger co-worker. You laugh, you toast the future and you even drink fewer shots than he does in the last joint. The final restraint has been of no use to you : the next morning you have a huge hangover, while he walks around the office as if nothing had happened.
It is not a lack of habit, but a purely biological question. Every time we drink alcohol, we add acetaldehyde, a highly toxic molecule derived from ethanol, into our body that causes dehydration, headache, dry mouth, stomach inflammation, nausea and general malaise. When we are young, our liver has huge amounts of enzymes designed to break down the intruder into acetate, carbon dioxide and water, three harmless substances.
But as we get older, the defensive arsenal diminishes, and the derivative of ethanol circulates for longer through our arteries doing its thing. Added to this is that the immune system is slower and slower when it comes to repairing tissue damage.
In addition to age and physical deterioration, there are other factors that aggravate the discomfort of the morning after, such as smoking while drinking alcohol and abusing certain beverages. According to a study by Brown University (USA), dark drinks (whiskey, red wine …) are worse than light drinks (vodka, white wine …), perhaps due to the number of substances that are produced during the fermentation of alcohol.
