The sayings go: "Beer before wine and you'll feel fine; wine before beer and you'll feel queer," or "Grape or grain but never the twain," but a new study has debunked the popular wisdom on hangovers.
Researchers primarily at Germany's University of Witten/Herdecke wanted to verify the sayings, which also exist in German and other languages, by conducting scientific tests on drinkers.
The results: It does not matter in which order you drink beer and wine, your hangover is equally as bad. Too much alcohol is too much alcohol, the team wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published on Friday.
"We clearly showed that the saying is wrong, at least for white wine and lager beer," says medical scientist Kai Hensel, who led the experiment in Witten.
Hensel's research team divided around 90 volunteers aged 19-40 into three groups. The task was the same for everyone: to get properly drunk, namely to a blood alcohol level of 1.1 milligrams per litre.
The people in the first group drank only beer, those in group two only wine. Anyone who had reached a blood alcohol level of about 0.5 switched to the other drink, on average after 1.5 litres of beer or four large glasses of wine.
People in the third group spent the whole evening drinking the same drink, either beer or wine.
On the second evening, the drinkers then changed groups.
The evaluation revealed the order of the drinks did not matter for the extent of the hangover, nor did gender, weight or general drinking habits.
