Should I drink soft drinks to sober up?

After drinking alcohol, can I drink more soft drinks to reduce the amount of alcohol in my body, reduce headaches and dizziness? (Thuc Anh, 28 years old, Hanoi).

Reply:

Alcohol reduces blood glucose levels, leading to dizziness. Drinking too much alcohol causes you to urinate more than usual, leading to dehydration, thirst, headaches, etc.

Alcohol reduces the amount of B vitamins, thereby reducing the body's ability to metabolize and excrete alcohol.

In fact, natural sugars in honey and fruit can help eliminate alcohol from the body quickly. You should eat mangoes, grapes, oranges, pears, and bananas. Watermelon helps rehydrate the body after drinking a lot of alcohol. Bananas contain a lot of carbohydrates, prevent stomach emptying, help increase blood glucose levels, and are rich in potassium.

However, you should not drink soft drinks to sober up, because the carbon dioxide in carbonated soft drinks helps alcohol penetrate the stomach lining faster than usual, causing more drunkenness, fatigue, and headaches. Drinking tea and coffee will also make the body work twice as hard to eliminate both.

To reduce drunkenness, you should eat before, during and after drinking alcohol, which helps keep blood glucose levels stable and balanced, because lack of blood glucose leads to headaches, by reducing the accumulation of blood acid.

Drink water before and during drinking alcohol. Add water, coconut water, alkaline drinks with electrolytes such as potassium, magnesium to neutralize alcohol. You can eat some toast, crackers, applesauce to provide energy.

The average person should not drink more than two units of alcohol per day for men, one unit of alcohol per day for women and no more than five days per week. One unit of alcohol is equivalent to about three-quarters of a 330 ml bottle/can of beer (5%) or one 330 ml glass of draft beer or one 100 ml glass of wine (13.5%) or one 30 ml shot of spirits (40%).

Associate Professor, Dr. Nguyen Quang Dung
Deputy Head of Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, Hanoi Medical University

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