Low carb and hangovers.

By all measures I should be doubled with a hangover over now.
And its not just today, this has been an on going pattern, but yesterday was the biggest by fat, 3-6 drinks a night in a 4-6hr window was the "norm" for weeks.

But, I had 16 drinks yesterday in a 12 hr window, 8 of wood aged, coffee infused vodka then a big lunch of 2 chicken breast and sauteed veggies followed by 8 more of 20% alcohol, home made apple wine.
So Maybe 1500-1800 cal in food, and 1600-1800 in alcohol, and maybe 10gm carb.
My thought is - headache is an inflammation, and without carbs it lies dormant. Of course when I eat carbs, I could get it, except, when I have any quantity of carbs, I dont drink.

I will mention something here that I posted on MDA last month. I finally got the opportunity to get a small respite from being my DH's caregiver. I generally don't drink. I will have a glass of wine at a family dinner for a holiday or birthday, but otherwise I can't afford to. Not with the responsibility I have with my DH.

On this weekend, I had a couple of Long Island Ice Teas. Wow could I taste the sugar. Haven't had them in years and I haven't had much sugar in a few years and esp this last one so it really hit me.

Funny thing is, the sugar was the only thing that hit me. By rights a drink that includes 5 shots if made properly should have laid me out, considering I don't drink. I did not even get the slightest buzz and both drinks were with in approx an hour to and 1 1/2 window.

For me, primal mostly to the whole 30 range seems neuro protective from alcohol. I cannot get a buzz. And the next morning, there were no issues either.

Grok on

Caregiving is a full time X 2 job. I can see how stressful that is.
I get a buzz, very quickly and with very little alcohol. Especially when fasting. I tend to start drinking long before I start eating. Even so, 8 before lunch is a all time record even for me. May have been the caffeine that held me up till lunch. Post which me and my brother both crashed.

LIIT was my favorite drink, I'd swap out the coke in it for ginger ale. Back in my sugar days, mix lemon and sugar and put in fridge, and mix with ginger ale - awesome.

Srinath, you are a very heavy drinker and no doubt your system has adapted a great deal to your high alcohol intake. As such, I think all things like what you posted just show how much of an outlier you are.

I think this is much like what we saw with our daughter who ate a SAD diet with us as a pre-teen and early teenager without noticing any issues, then was diagnosed as having celiac. Once she cut out the gluten, any smidgen of gluten in her food now causes her to have a severe reaction.

I so strongly recommend you start cutting the booze way, way back before you pickle all your "innards."

RigD - I am cutting way way back once I do this blood test in Jan. I hate drinking in winter sitting in front of the TV. My drinking has to be accompanied by working on stuff, preferably in the sun. I am looking for what the alcohol does in the context of a very very low carb diet in calorie balance.

Rig D wrote:

I so strongly recommend you start cutting the booze way, way back before you pickle all your "innards."

But think of the money the family will save on embalming!

Good luck on starting this winter, but please don't kick it back up when spring comes. Seize the opportunity to cut it out for the winter, make it permanent when it warms up.

I am not stopping drinking for good. There is the occasional weekend with lots of it in summer, and the usual 2-3 per evening, and the pause for winter that I hope to keep up for the rest of my life.
The whole embalming BS - sadly, no insulin = no permanent damage possible from alcohol. Your body cant do anything except run out of fat and whither away without insulin. Maybe sometime near 5% BF, I'd start to eat healthy tissue including the neccesary fat. Seeing as I am atleast 25 lb up from that region I'd not worry about it yet.
The second theory is that I am getting a tolerance for it, except, the first sip I can still feel and still get baked drinking 1 drink over a 20-30 min period. There may be some ill effect, but I dont know yet what that is.

I keep forgetting that you are a "literal string" type person. Agree on the embalming. I had several uncles with alcohol issues and seeing the long term effect of their drinking, and seeing my father's career derailed by a boss with long standing alcohol issues, I will once again advocate for you drastically reducing your intake.

IMHO, the first issue people have is denial of an an alcohol problem.

But you have, as I do, a hard head, so I'll put it to bed with this one. Good luck.

Well, there is lots of people with alcohol related health issues. Do you know if any of them have been on a very very low carb diet ?
I am at the tail end of a 6 month experiment in the upper end of moderate with occasional runs into the heavy category. Several days ending saturday was under 6/day, sunday was 16, yesterday was 5. Will stay under 5/day through the next 2+ weeks.

Most books I read regarding ketosis/low carb warn that one may experience a reduced alcohol tolerance. No mechanisms put forth, just a significant amount of anecdotal reports. Not sure about the hangover side of it.

My alcohol tolerance was low to begin with, and I'm sure fasting makes it worse. Low carb may have a lot smaller effect than that, I'm sure it plays some role. I've been eating nuts and cheese in copious quantities in the last 2 days. No effect on the hangovers - or lack of.

Just make sure you minimize PUFA's and maximize Sat Fats. Lots and lots of stuff on PubMed with rats or mice and the effects of those two fatty acid types. Critters on a high PUFA diet get liver disease. Those on Sat Fats not only don't, but actually reverse the damage of the PUFA's.

MUFA is good ? I pretty much am sat fat or MUFA (coconut oil or olive oil) but I do eat tons of peanuts and other assorted nuts.
I've heard peanuts are not nearly as bad as the peanut oil due to the processing involved. In fact I want to switch to steamed or raw peanuts (this being the south its on every street corner).

srinath_69 wrote:MUFA is good ? I pretty much am sat fat or MUFA (coconut oil or olive oil) but I do eat tons of peanuts and other assorted nuts.
I've heard peanuts are not nearly as bad as the peanut oil due to the processing involved. In fact I want to switch to steamed or raw peanuts (this being the south its on every street corner).

No idea on MUFA's. Maybe in between? Neither good nor bad.

There's no processing to make peanut oil. It's just squeezed out like olive oil. Probably also like olive oil, that's the bulk of it, and then maybe they extract more by solvents. That's the deflowered olive oil

While peanut oil is excellent in lipid profile, if you are wanting the benefits of Sat Fats, that's what you have to consume.

It's boiled peanuts in the south, not steamed. No one in their right mind eats them raw. Certainly no health benefits one type over any other type.

Dry roasted peanuts are roasted @ very high temps causing a lot of damage as well as allergies in the first exposures to kids. Peanut allergies are near about unheard of in India where your first exposure to peanuts are usually to sand roasted or even raw. I love raw peanuts as well as the low temp roasting I do to them. It slows down my scarfing rates - that's the second benefit.
Yea Boiled peanuts a plenty, you're correct on that.
I've got to look into Extra Virgin peanut oil, if such an animal exists. Thanks, I pretty much decimate a lb or 3 of peanuts per week. And other nuts ~1lb/wk.

Newest research points to starting babies on peanut butter at early ages. Really cuts down on the severity of the peanut allergy in the older kids.

Is peanut butter made from lighter roasts of peanuts ? That could explain it. I can almost guarantee you, they're going to end up with "well if we start the babies on boiled or raw peanuts then there will be no allergies". The allergen is a long chain protein which happens when the high heat of roasting joins a lot of smaller proteins into this 1 mega protein. No high temp roast = no mega protein.

Again, some citations or something, please?

Americans have been eating roasted peanuts - and the "butter" starts out with the exact same nuts - for three hundred years. No problems until lately.

Paysan wrote:Newest research points to starting babies on peanut butter at early ages. Really cuts down on the severity of the peanut allergy in the older kids.

Yep! I remember when my first was born nearly 18 years ago, now. All the hype was on delayed introduction to different foods. It just didn't make sense to me. I kept thinking how kids in my own generation, and older, always ate what mom and dad were eating and I knew no one, growing up, that had a food allergy. I have fed both my kids any food they wanted from as young as they could physically eat it. Neither of them have any food allergies.

Now, my kids have also been adjusted since they were literally 5 minutes old and regularly since. They are also not vaccinated. So, there are a lot of factors at play here. But, nope, not a single food intolerance or allergy.

I once was in the school office and up on the wall is a HUGE hanging "allergy list". It was sort of like one of those plastic shoe storage items you would hang from the back of a closet door. On each section was a picture of the child, their allergy, and whatever allergy meds or epipen, etc was needed. This is a school of 800 kids and there were probably 40-50 kids contained in that allergy display. Incredible!

OnTheBayou wrote:Again, some citations or something, please?

Americans have been eating roasted peanuts - and the "butter" starts out with the exact same nuts - for three hundred years.  No problems until lately.

We eat roasted peanuts for 100's of yrs in India too. No peanut allergy - till the industrial roasting started. The home roast is much lower temp. Industrial roasting is much higher temp. It prevents the nut from getting that "wet texture" ever. The roasting we used to do would get that soft wet cardboard like feel after a few weeks even if we put it in hot jaggery (molasses) and rolled up into balls. Nice and crisp for a few weeks, after which it gets more like flour when you bite into it.
So yes Americans eat for 100's of yrs, and the industrial giants get in the mix and allergies start. Sounds like something else we know ??? we eat bread for 1000's of yrs, and now you cant walk in the store without tripping over these things selling for 50c a lb and we're all diabetic. Same with everything else.

I grew up consuming vast, and I mean vast quantities of PB & J sandwiches (yes, white bread), and had more than my fair share of boiled peanuts. I was in solid company with all the other kids, our folks were all modest income types and PB & J was economical food for feeding those rambunctious youngsters in between trips to the neighborhood ball field. We never went to restaurants, and all this predates my ever hearing of a McDonalds or other fast food.

Nobody had food allergies. Nobody had even heard of food allergies.

So what is the problem today? IMO (I'd like to think opinion based pretty solidly on a lot of reading across a number of health topics): Too many moms are discouraged from breast-feeding. They end up feeding their babies way too much crap formula. We feed our kids all kinds of processed junk food as they grow up. We don't foster an active life style. We have "big agri" overusing the land and mono-cropping, gradually degrading the top soil. We have GMO'ed our main grains, we have "big chem" providing sophisticated poisons for the crops to supposedly increase yield. Our meat animals and eggs come from virtual "food factories" as opposed to farms/range land. Too many schools provide a lunch that is laughably non-nutritious. In the USA,the fedgov has for decades fostered a diet regimen that is quite poor.

It's a wonder anyone is healthy.

My younger daughter has celiac. We always wondered where she got her physical build, into her early teens she was extremely rail thin. Our GP gave her a physical for high school sports, and from looking at her, he insisted on testing her for a number of deficiencies. The big one was an iron deficiency, she was so anemic he said that she could easily be in the hospital. Further testing eventually identified gluten as the problem that had almost totally erased her small intestine's ability to pull nutrients from her food.  At the time, she was the only person I knew that had this problem. In the year after correcting her diet, she gained 3 inches in height and about 30 pounds.

The hangover issue is inconclusive.
5 very sugary in a 5hr evening drinks and low carb dinner didn't cause a hangover.
6 hard liquor with nuts in a 6 hr period didn't.
8 beers and high carb in a 12 hr period similarly no hangover.
I think I have no idea, or that 8 isn't enough and I am not pushing this, cos I am not experimenting on the tendency to get a Hangover, I am trying to test if alcohol causes cholestrol/Triglycerides to rise in thje context of low carb weight balance type eating.

Srinath, one thing to keep in mind is that all the n=1 experiments in the world are just that - a test of YOUR individual reactions to a specified protocol. For instance, Daughter went vegan a few months ago, and was horrified when blood tests showed elevated cholesterol and triglycerides . It scared her into heading into a high meat diet. A recent blood test showed her HDL improved (total cholesterol slightly higher, though) and her triglycerides down to a more average figure. I doubt if I would be as sharply impacted.
Besides, Srinath, you know what they say - no drunk considers himself hungover at the time.

The only rational answer is to stop drinking alcohol. If I thought you were capable of moderation, I'd say that a couple of drinks per day is fine. But you seem to be drawn to extreme behaviors. Counting windows after you jump from a building may be data, but it's best not to jump in the first place.