Look up “hangover cure” on Google and anyone (well, anyone actually looking out for your health) will tell you post-gaming your wild night is a wildly bad idea for curing your throbbing headache and queasy stomach. But did anyone ever consider that stripping the booze from your favorite drink at boozy brunch could actually be the next best hangover cure? Probably not, considering a boozy brunch wouldn’t exist without, well, booze. But the truth is, the Bloody Mary, a simple brunch classic made with tomato juice, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and vodka, is actually a pretty stellar hangover cure, even when you (regretfully) hold the vodka.
Over the past few years, brunch spots everywhere have been in constant competition, one-upping each other with each new Bloody Mary creation. Each one seems to grow bigger and crazier, piled high with even more random ingredients than the one before. It is no longer acceptable to shame your Bloody Mary with a simple green olive skewer and a celery stalk. If your spicy concoction doesn’t look like it’s about to topple over from the enormous kebab stacked on top, you’re doing it wrong. Luckily for us, when everything from an entire hamburger slider to a skewer of tater tots could be decorating our Bloody, it’s easier to forget that the drink lacks vodka.
When you finally locate your straw somewhere in the commotion, you’ll actually be sipping on a good number of healthy ingredients that could contribute to alleviating your headache or settling your stomach. Tomato juice boasts a number of health benefits on its own, like a high concentration of the antioxidant lycopene, which helps to fight the toxins in your liver that you willingly ingested only a few short hours ago. Lycopene has also been shown to improve brain function by monitoring genes that reduce inflammation and stimulate brain growth.
But tomato juice isn’t the only key ingredient of a Bloody Mary offering serious hangover cure capabilities. Worcestershire sauce, which combines anchovies, molasses, garlic, cloves, and chili pepper, is rich in Vitamin B6, which helps our bodies fight infection and aids in digestion. Due to a high content of niacin, or Vitamin B3, in anchovies, Worcestershire sauce actually helps our body break down carbohydrates and fats into energy (late night drunchies aren’t looking so bad anymore…) and further aids our livers in eliminating toxins.
Another ingredient in a Bloody Mary with hangover-expelling health benefits is lemon juice, which is essential to soothing your digestive tract and acting as a natural laxative. When alcohol enters your body, the digestive system immediately wants to get it out to try to minimize the amount absorbed directly into the bloodstream. But when your body prioritizes the digestion of alcohol, it puts other foods and nutrients on the digestive back-burner, which leaves you feeling constipated and bloated in the morning. In addition, the acids in lemon juice force your body to process useful nutrients more slowly, meaning that you’ll derive more nutrients out of that massive chicken leg teetering on top of your Bloody (if you manage to grab it before it falls).
All in all, a virgin Bloody Mary (hold the insane garnish) has about 40 calories, 9 grams of sugar, and 10 grams of carbohydrates. That’s less than a mimosa or even a nonfat iced coffee, and when you consider the added digestive and immune system benefits of a Bloody Mary, it definitely seems worth giving this classic drink a try to cure your next bloody awful hangover. And hey, if it doesn’t work, at least you’ll have some crazy drink photos to post when you wake up from your 7-hour nap later.