When you’re hungover, your stomach lining is already inflamed, your blood sugar is unstable, and you’re dehydrated. The wrong food choices can make all of these worse. While there’s no magic cure for a hangover beyond time and hydration, avoiding certain foods and drinks can keep you from piling new misery on top of what alcohol already did to your body.
Greasy and Fried Foods
The classic hangover breakfast of bacon, hash browns, and fried eggs is one of the most popular remedies out there, and one of the least helpful once you’re already feeling rough. Fat slows stomach emptying, which means greasy food sits in your digestive tract longer than lighter options would. When your stomach is already irritated from alcohol, that prolonged digestion can intensify nausea and leave you feeling heavy and sluggish for hours.
Eating a fatty meal before drinking is a different story. Fat in your stomach slows alcohol absorption, which can reduce how drunk you get and potentially lessen the hangover that follows. But once the hangover has arrived, the damage is done. Your stomach lining is inflamed, and loading it with hard-to-digest food just creates more work for a system that’s already struggling. Opt for something bland and easy to process instead, like toast or plain rice.
Sugary Foods and Drinks
Reaching for a pastry, a candy bar, or a glass of orange juice might feel like a quick energy fix, but refined sugar can make your hangover symptoms worse by destabilizing your blood sugar even further. Alcohol disrupts glucose regulation in a specific way: while your liver is busy breaking down alcohol, it stops releasing glucose into your bloodstream. This can cause your blood sugar to drop, producing shakiness, fatigue, and weakness that overlap with (and amplify) your hangover symptoms.
Flooding your system with a big dose of refined sugar creates a spike followed by another crash, which restarts the cycle of feeling shaky and exhausted. If you want something sweet, pair it with protein or complex carbohydrates that release energy more gradually. A banana with peanut butter, for example, provides natural sugar alongside fiber and fat that slow absorption.
Acidic Foods and Citrus
Alcohol causes a mild form of gastritis, meaning the lining of your stomach is inflamed. Acidic foods like citrus fruits, tomatoes, and vinegar-based sauces add further irritation to tissue that’s already raw. Johns Hopkins Medicine notes that while acidic and spicy foods don’t cause gastritis on their own, they can cause significant discomfort when gastritis is already present.
This is worth keeping in mind if your go-to hangover meal involves tomato-based hot sauce or a big glass of grapefruit juice. Spicy foods fall into the same category. Capsaicin stimulates the same inflamed lining that alcohol just spent the night irritating, and the result is often heartburn, nausea, or stomach pain that wasn’t there before you ate. Stick to foods closer to neutral on the pH scale: oatmeal, bananas, eggs (not fried), or plain crackers.
Coffee and Caffeinated Drinks
A cup of coffee feels like exactly what you need when you’re groggy and headachy the morning after. But caffeine is a double-edged sword during a hangover. It’s a mild diuretic, meaning it increases urine output, and you’re already dehydrated from alcohol’s much stronger diuretic effect. Adding caffeine on top of that can slow your rehydration.
Caffeine also stimulates stomach acid production. On an inflamed stomach lining, that extra acid can trigger nausea or worsen the queasy feeling you already have. The NIAAA is blunt about this: drinking coffee does not prevent or cure a hangover. If you’re a regular coffee drinker and skipping it entirely would give you a withdrawal headache, a small amount with plenty of water alongside it is reasonable. But a large black coffee on an empty, hungover stomach is a recipe for feeling worse.
Carbonated Drinks
Soda, sparkling water, and energy drinks introduce gas into a digestive system that’s already sensitive. Carbonation causes burping, bloating, and increased stomach pressure, all of which feel significantly worse when your gut is inflamed from alcohol. If nausea is one of your main symptoms, the added pressure from carbonation can push you closer to actually vomiting.
This includes carbonated “hangover cure” drinks and fizzy sports drinks. You’re better off sipping flat water or an electrolyte drink without carbonation. If you want something with flavor, diluted coconut water or a non-carbonated electrolyte mix will rehydrate you without the bloating.
More Alcohol
The “hair of the dog” idea, having a Bloody Mary or a beer the next morning, is the worst thing on this list. It feels like it works because it does provide temporary relief, but the mechanism behind that relief is the problem. One leading explanation involves methanol, a trace alcohol present in many drinks. Your body converts methanol into formaldehyde and formic acid, both toxic, and this process contributes to hangover symptoms. Drinking more ethanol (regular alcohol) blocks methanol metabolism, which temporarily pauses that toxic conversion and makes you feel better.
But “pauses” is the key word. You haven’t eliminated the methanol. You’ve just delayed the reckoning while adding more alcohol your liver now has to process. When the new alcohol wears off, your body picks up where it left off, often with a worse hangover than the original because there’s now more total alcohol to metabolize. Over time, habitually using this strategy is also a warning sign for developing alcohol dependence.
What Actually Helps
The foods that work during a hangover share a few traits: they’re bland, easy to digest, and they help restore what alcohol took away. Plain carbohydrates like toast, rice, or crackers give your liver the glucose it needs to function without the blood sugar roller coaster of refined sugar. Bananas replace potassium lost through alcohol’s diuretic effect. Eggs contain an amino acid that helps your body process the toxic byproducts of alcohol metabolism.
Hydration matters more than food choice. Water is the foundation, but adding electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium) speeds up the process because alcohol depletes all three. Sip fluids steadily rather than chugging a liter at once, which can trigger nausea on a sensitive stomach. Eat small amounts frequently instead of one large meal, giving your digestive system manageable portions to handle while it recovers.