To make alcohol hangover
By admin on 2014-12-29

It may sound like an unlikely solution to the morning after the night before.

Scientists have found that a few glasses of bubbly could prevent you waking up with a sore head.

But before you reach for a bottle of champagne, there's a catch: while traditional fizzy tipples contain carbon dioxide, research shows that infusing the alcohol with oxygen instead allows drinkers to sober up more quickly.

The extra-bubbly booze may also make hangovers less severe, offering the prospect of beer, wines and spirits that give all of the pleasure of alcohol, without any of the pain.

The Korean researchers capitalised on oxygen's role in breaking down alcohol. When we have a few drinks, the ethanol in them is processed in the liver, helped along by the oxygen we breathe in.

To speed up the process, the scientists fed a group of willing volunteers alcoholic drinks containing varying levels of oxygen, then timed how long it took them to sober up. Boosting the oxygen levels cut the time it took them to clear the alcohol from their bodies by 10 to 20 per cent.

Professor Kwang-il Kwon, of Chungnam National University, said: 'The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage reduces plasma alcohol concentrations faster than a normal dissolved-oxygen alcohol beverage does.
'This could provide both clinical and real-life significance.

'The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage would allow individuals to become sober faster, and reduce the side effects without a significant difference in alcohol's effects.'

It is not yet known how adding extra fizz would affect the taste of the typical tipple, but the scientists added that it should be relatively easy to create oxygen-rich options that keep their sparkle.

Writing in the journal Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research, they said: 'It seems that these drinks can maintain a high dissolved-oxygen concentration for about ten to 20 days before the stopper is removed and for 70 minutes after removing the stopper at room temperature.'

But British experts cautioned that the effect produced by the oxygen was relatively small.

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chairman of the Alcohol Health Alliance, said: 'If you had two pints of beer, you would clear it from the body in three and a half hours rather than four.

'But people might find they don't get as drunk and just take another drink.'