3 common alcohol myths, debunked

Humans have a long history with alcohol—we’ve been making and consuming it for over ten thousand years, about as long as we’ve had agriculture. 

That’s a long time for people to come up with all kinds of ideas about the drug and how it works. So, not surprisingly, some of them are wrong. Here are a few common myths about alcohol, debunked by scientific research. 

The order of your drinks doesn’t matter

You’ve probably heard some version of “beer before liquor never been sicker,” or “beer before wine and you’ll feel fine.” The basic idea is that you should stick to one kind of beverage, or drink different beverages in a particular order, in order to avoid a hangover. The problem: there’s no scientific research backing this claim.

The National Institution on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism calls drink order as a cause of hangovers a myth. “In general, the more alcohol a person drinks, the worse the hangover will be,” they say on their website. “This is true regardless of whether a person drinks beer, wine, distilled spirits, or a combination of these.” 

Researchers at Witten/Herdecke University published a paper that looked into this specifically, conducting what may be the most German scientific study in history. They had groups of people drink beer and then wine, or vice versa, alongside control groups just drinking one beverage or the other. Then they invited participants for another session, this time with wine and then beer in the opposite order, and compared the severity of the hangovers. This resulted in plenty of hangovers, though the order of drinks consumed didn’t have any real impact. 

That’s not to say you can’t predict who at a party is going to be hungover. The study helpfully states that “subjective signs of progressive intoxication were confirmed as accurate predictors of hangover severity.” It also includes what is possibly the greatest sentence I’ve ever seen in a scientific study: “Multivariate regression analyses revealed perceived drunkenness and vomiting as the strongest predictors for hangover intensity.” 

Alcohol doesn’t warm you up

You might experience a warming feeling after a drink—many people do and enjoy it. But that doesn’t mean alcohol actually warms you up. That feeling of warming is the feeling of heat leaving your body, which isn’t ideal. Dr. Krishna Vakharia, an MD based in the UK, wrote an article explaining the effects of alcohol on your body temperature, stating that while “flushed cheeks, sweating, and hot flushes make us feel warm, our core body temperature is actually dropping.” 

There’s research backing this up. A 2005 study at the Advanced Research Center for Human Sciences at Waseda University in Japan concluded that alcohol actually lowers your core body temperature. Participants drank either water or alcohol in a mildly hot room. “Skin blood flow and chest sweat rate in the alcohol session significantly increased over those in controls 10 minutes after drinking,” the study states. “Deep body temperature in the alcohol session started to decrease 20 minutes after the onset of sweating and eventually fell 0.3°C lower than in the controls.” 

Which is to say alcohol makes you feel warm by releasing the heat in your body. That heat is exactly what you need to preserve in cold temperatures, so drinking isn’t a great way to stay warm. So much for those dogs with brandy barrels around their necks. 

Coffee doesn’t sober you up

Alcohol is the second most popular drug in the world, behind caffeine. It makes sense, then, that there’s a common myth about combining the two: the idea that giving coffee, or any caffeinated drink, can sober them up. 

There is no truth to this idea. Caffeine might make you feel alert, but it doesn’t counteract the effects of alcohol. A 2010 study conducted by the Boston University School of Public Health had 127 participants randomly consume one of four types of beer: non-alcoholic, with or without caffeine added, and alcoholic, with or without caffeine added. Participants then attempted to drive a simulated car. 

The conclusion: “The addition of caffeine to alcohol does not appear to enhance driving or sustained attention/reaction time performance relative to alcohol alone.” That aligns with the broader scientific consensus. A cup of coffee might make you feel awake, even after a few drinks, but that doesn’t mean you’re sobering up. Only time can do that. 

 

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