Yale Students Think They Can Cure Hangovers for Real

Some people swear that Gatorade is the perfect hangover cure, while others insist on drinking a glass of water with Advil before going to bed drunk. Unfortunately, scientists don’t actually understand how and why we get hangovers all that well, contrary to what you might have heard [PDF]. That makes curing them challenging, but a pair of students at Yale University claim they’ve found the answer, Time reports.

Liam McClintock and Margaret Morse's powder supplement, SunUp, is designed to be mixed with water and then ingested before you hit the party. According to the creators, the powder mixture targets four different aspects of hangover creation: the buildup of the toxic alcohol byproduct acetaldehyde in the liver; the glutamine overproduction that causes poor sleep after drinking; the overproduction of cytokines that causes inflammation in the immune system; and the loss of vitamins and electrolytes. Ideally, SunUp’s ingredients combat all these processes to leave you feeling better the next morning.

SunUp doesn’t have a monopoly on the hangover-cure space. There are also hangover-aiding supplements like Over EZ and HangOver, pill packs designed to be taken before you start drinking, before you go to bed, or when you wake up the next morning. SunUp’s team acknowledges, too, that the science they based their product development on isn’t entirely rock-hard: “For full disclosure, many of these studies were performed on rodents, not humans, and there is limited scientific evidence linking our ingredients directly to hangover prevention,” they write on the SunUp blog.

Right now, the SunUp team is crowdfunding to raise enough money to manufacture their first commercial batch, which will cost a minimum of $20,000. On Indiegogo, single packs cost $5 each, or you can buy in larger quantities at up to a 60 percent discount. (If you throw down $7000, you get a whole 4000 servings.) The deliveries are expected by the end of April.