How to Prevent a Hangover: Evidence-Based Habits Before, During and After Drinking

The only reliable way to prevent a hangover is to drink less or not at all; beyond that, eating first, pacing yourself, choosing lower-congener drinks and protecting your sleep can make the next morning less bad.¹ Here's how to prevent a hangover before, during and after drinking, with each habit rated by the evidence, including popular ones that hold up less well than you'd think.

What's the only guaranteed way to prevent a hangover?

Not drinking, or drinking very little. NIAAA: "The only way to completely avoid a hangover is to not drink alcohol at all or to keep alcohol intake to a minimum."¹ The current US Dietary Guidelines say the same about health in general: "Consume less alcohol for better overall health."⁶

Hangovers can also follow fewer drinks than people assume. Researchers once treated a blood alcohol level of 0.11% as the usual threshold for a hangover, but group data show hangovers at lower levels.⁷ Everything below shifts the odds; nothing guarantees a clear morning.

What should you eat before drinking?

A real meal. Alcohol is absorbed fastest from the small intestine, and food slows how quickly your stomach empties into it, so blood alcohol rises more slowly. Meals high in fat, carbohydrate or protein work about equally well.²

Food also seems to help on the way out: blood alcohol falls at about 0.010% to 0.015% an hour after drinking on an empty stomach, versus 0.015% to 0.020% after eating.⁸ That's a mechanism, not proof that a meal prevents hangovers, and no trial has tested that directly.

One small study of 23 drinkers found that people who ate more zinc and nicotinic acid (niacin) in their usual diet reported milder hangovers.¹² That's a correlation, not a reason to take supplements.

How to prevent a hangover while you're drinking

Count standard drinks, pace yourself, and alternate with something nonalcoholic. Those three habits limit the thing that matters most: how much alcohol ends up in your blood.¹

A US standard drink contains 14 grams of pure alcohol. Real pours, especially of wine, cocktails and craft beer, are often bigger.¹³

A 12-ounce beer at 10% counts as two drinks.¹³ Our guide to what a standard drink is has more examples.

• Pace yourself. Your body clears alcohol at a fairly fixed rate, roughly one standard drink every one to two hours for many adults, and nothing has been shown to meaningfully speed it up.^{2, 8} Drink faster than that and your blood alcohol keeps climbing.
• Know the binge line. For a typical adult, about 5 drinks for men or 4 for women in roughly two hours brings blood alcohol to 0.08% or higher.¹⁴
• Alternate with water. It slows your pace and helps with thirst, but don't count on it alone. In a 2026 crossover trial of 13 men, water with sake didn't change next-day symptoms, and survey data show only a modest effect.^{5, 9} More in does water between drinks prevent a hangover?

Does the type of drink matter? Congeners and dark liquors

A little. Darker drinks tend to contain more congeners, the other compounds produced during fermentation, and those can make a hangover feel worse for some people. But the alcohol itself is the main culprit.¹

The best test: 95 heavy drinkers aged 21 to 33 drank to the same breath alcohol level (0.11%) on bourbon one night and vodka on another, with placebo nights for comparison. Both drinks produced hangovers, and people felt worse after bourbon. Next-day performance didn't differ, and the authors concluded that congeners affect only how people feel.⁴

Wine has its own issue: sulfites, added as preservatives, can cause headaches in people who are sensitive to them.¹ Methanol, a congener found in some drinks, is a popular suspect, but in 36 drinkers urine methanol didn't track hangover severity.¹⁵ For wine specifically, see wine hangovers.

Does mixing drinks matter? "Beer before liquor" tested

Not in the best trial. Order and mixing made no measurable difference; how drunk people got did.³

In the 2019 study, 90 adults aged 19 to 40 (half of them women) drank beer and then wine, wine and then beer, or only one of the two, up to a breath alcohol level of at least 0.11%. A week or more later, they switched. Neither the type nor the order changed hangover severity. Feeling drunk and vomiting were the strongest predictors.³

Two caveats: the trial was open-label, and it tested beer and wine, not liquor. No trial has tested "beer before liquor" itself.³ Mixing drinks can still make it harder to keep count. More folk rules are fact-checked in hangover myths.

What should you do before bed?

Stop early, skip acetaminophen, and give yourself time to sleep in.

• Stop early. Alcohol helps you fall asleep but fragments the second half of the night and cuts REM sleep.¹⁶ Blood alcohol can also keep rising after the last drink.¹⁴
• Water and a snack, if you want them. Fine for thirst and hunger, but neither has been shown to prevent a hangover.⁹
• Don't take acetaminophen "just in case." Some people take it before bed to head off a hangover, but alcohol and acetaminophen together can be toxic to the liver.¹
• Plan the morning, too. A hangover can impair attention, decision-making and coordination, so don't plan on driving early.¹
• Look out for friends. If someone is very drunk, don't put them to bed to sleep it off and walk away.¹⁴

Do "pre-drinking" supplements prevent hangovers? What the FDA and research say

No supplement or drug has been shown to prevent hangovers. A 2005 systematic review found "no compelling evidence" for any intervention, and a 2022 review of 21 placebo-controlled trials rated all the evidence as very low quality.^{10, 11}

Trials of products taken before drinking haven't changed that. N-acetylcysteine (NAC) didn't significantly reduce total hangover scores in a 49-person trial.¹⁸ Prickly pear extract taken five hours before drinking eased some symptoms, but the overall symptom score didn't significantly improve.¹⁹

Dihydromyricetin (DHM), a plant flavonoid, is one of the most common ingredients in these products, yet as of October 2026 no randomized trial indexed in PubMed has tested DHM on its own for hangover in people. The research is mostly in rats and mice, and the small human trials used Hovenia extracts that contain less than 1% DHM.²⁰ In 2025, researchers concluded that efficacy hadn't been demonstrated for any hangover product on the US market.²¹

Regulators agree. In July 2020, FDA sent warning letters to seven companies, treating claims to cure, treat or prevent hangovers as unapproved drug claims.²² It cited even "Helps prevent hangover symptoms*," asterisk and disclaimer included.²³ As an FDA official put it at the time, "Dietary supplements are not a substitute for responsibly limiting one's alcohol consumption."²⁴ For more, see do hangover pills work?

Your personal risk factors: genetics, age, sleep and medications

Some people get worse hangovers from the same amount of alcohol. A few reasons are well documented.

• Genetics. About 36% of East Asians have a flushing response to alcohol, mostly because of an inherited ALDH2 deficiency that lets acetaldehyde build up, causing flushing, nausea and a fast heartbeat. Regular drinkers with the variant have a much higher risk of esophageal cancer, and no supplement makes drinking safer for them.²⁵ Asian Americans with the variant also reported worse hangovers.²⁶ See Asian flush.
• Age. Contrary to the cliché, surveys find hangovers become less common and severe with age. In 51,645 Danes, men aged 18 to 29 had 6.8 times the odds of a severe hangover after binge drinking as men 60 and older.²⁷ A Dutch study of 761 drinkers found the same decline after accounting for how much people drank, possibly because pain sensitivity falls with age.²⁸ Both are surveys, so treat them with some caution.
• Sleep. Alcohol's disruption of sleep tracked with hangover severity in a lab trial, so a short or broken night adds to the damage.⁴
• Medications and health conditions. People taking medicines that interact with alcohol, or with conditions that do, should avoid it, as should anyone pregnant, recovering from alcohol use disorder or unable to control their drinking.⁶ Ask a pharmacist if you're unsure.

For the biology behind all of this, see what causes a hangover, and for the morning itself, how to cure a hangover.

What we don't know yet

• Whether eating first or pacing reduces hangovers in a controlled trial. The case rests on how alcohol is absorbed and cleared.²
• Whether beer-before-liquor order matters; only beer and wine have been tested.³
• Whether any supplement prevents hangovers. Most positive results come from single, small trials.¹¹

Published by Fuller Health, which makes After Party. This article is general information, not medical advice: talk to a doctor or pharmacist about your own health, medicines and drinking. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research and write.