Something salty, something bland, fruit, and fluid alongside — and a caveat that no other article on this subject will give you.
No food has ever been tested against hangover outcomes in a controlled trial. Not eggs, not bananas, not the fry-up, not toast. Every list of hangover foods you have read, including the useful-sounding ones, is built on mechanism and folklore rather than evidence.
So this article does two things: it tells you what is actually worth eating and why, and it takes apart the specific claims that get repeated with far more confidence than they have earned.
Why there is no evidence, and what that means
The hangover trial literature exists — it is just not about food. Two systematic reviews cover it. The 2005 review in the BMJ assessed eight randomised trials of proposed remedies and concluded that no compelling evidence supported any of them. A 2022 review in Addiction assessed 21 placebo-controlled trials and rated the evidence very low quality across all of them, noting that no two studies tested the same remedy and no result had been independently replicated.
Every one of those trials tested an isolated compound or plant extract. Nobody has run "eat eggs" against a placebo breakfast.
That absence is not a reason to skip breakfast. Eating is obviously reasonable. It is a reason to be suspicious of anyone assigning specific powers to specific foods.
The claims that do not hold up
Eggs and cysteine
The most confidently repeated one, and the numbers kill it.
The mechanism sounds tidy: acetaldehyde, alcohol's toxic first metabolite, is partly cleared via glutathione, and cysteine is a building block of glutathione. Eggs contain cysteine. Therefore eggs.
Then you check the amounts. A whole large egg contains roughly 130–140mg of cysteine. The one randomised trial that found a hangover effect from cysteine used 600 to 1,200mg of purified L-cysteine — five to nine times as much, in supplement form, with completely different absorption than cysteine bound inside egg protein. That trial had 19 participants, all male, and was run on a supplement formulation.
To match the low end of the only supportive trial you would need to eat about five eggs, and even then you would be eating protein-bound cysteine rather than the isolated form the trial used. No study has tested eggs.
Eat eggs because they are protein and easy on a rough stomach. Not because of this.
Bananas and potassium
Also a chain of plausible steps that never gets checked.
Potassium depletion from alcohol is documented — in chronic heavy drinking and malnutrition, sometimes seriously. It is not established after an ordinary night out. And potassium is not the electrolyte that matters most here: the documented mechanism is vasopressin suppression driving sodium and fluid loss, which is a different mineral doing different work.
No trial has tested bananas or any potassium-rich food against hangover symptoms. A banana is a good breakfast. The reasoning attached to it is decorative.
The fried breakfast
Here the evidence is not just absent — the mechanism points the other way.
Alcohol irritates the stomach lining and increases acid secretion, which the NIAAA lists among the causes of hangover nausea. Fat slows gastric emptying. Nobody has tested a slow-digesting, high-fat meal against a queasy morning, and the physiology gives you a reason to expect it lands badly rather than well.
A fry-up works because it is hot, salty, and comforting, and because eating anything helps. If you feel fine, enjoy it. If you feel queasy, it is the wrong call and the grease is not the active ingredient.
Coffee
The NIAAA lists coffee among hangover myths outright, and there is a specific reason it feels like it works that has nothing to do with alcohol.
If you drink coffee every day, skipping it produces a caffeine withdrawal headache — a well-documented phenomenon that is easily mistaken for a hangover headache. Drinking your normal coffee resolves a problem that not drinking coffee created. That is real relief. It is not hangover relief.
Have your coffee if you always have coffee. Just do not credit it with more than it did. (Worth counting if you are keeping track: our own sticks contain caffeine too.)
What is actually worth eating
Since the evidence is thin, the honest basis for this section is mechanism plus the ordinary logic of eating when you feel rough. We are labelling it as such rather than dressing it up.
Something salty. This is the most defensible item on the list. You lost sodium, and sodium is what lets fluid stay put rather than passing straight through. Broth, soup, toast with a decent amount of salt, eggs with salt on them.
Something bland and easy. Toast, rice, plain potatoes, a banana. Standard clinical advice for an unsettled stomach, applied here — not tested here.
Fruit. Fluid, a little natural sugar, and it goes down when other things will not. Melon, oranges, berries.
Protein, when you can face it. Eggs, yoghurt, leftover chicken. Nothing hangover-specific about it; it is just how you build a real meal rather than a snack.
Soup or broth, if you can only manage one thing. Fluid and salt in a warm, easy form. Nearly every food culture independently landed on a savoury soup as the morning-after meal, and the composition genuinely points the right way even without a trial behind it.
On nausea, and ginger
Ginger is the one item here with serious trial evidence — just not in this context. Meta-analyses support it for nausea in pregnancy and for chemotherapy-induced nausea, with a plausible mechanism in gut motility and serotonin signalling.
Nobody has tested it on alcohol-related nausea. The transfer is inference, not evidence. But it is the best-supported inference on this page, and ginger tea is cheap and harmless, so it is a reasonable thing to try with your eyes open about why.
If nothing stays down at all, if you are vomiting repeatedly, or if you feel confused or disoriented, stop reading recipes and ring a doctor. Those are not breakfast problems.
The thing that actually predicted how you feel
Not what you eat now. What you drank last night — and there is real controlled evidence here, unlike everything else on this page.
In a double-blind crossover trial of 95 drinkers, participants drank bourbon on one night and vodka on another, matched for alcohol dose. Bourbon produced significantly worse hangovers. The difference is congeners — the non-ethanol compounds produced in fermentation and ageing, which dark spirits carry far more of than clear ones.
The catch, and it is a real one: next-day cognitive and psychomotor performance was equally impaired after both. You feel worse after the dark stuff. You are not more impaired by it. Alcohol dose does that part, whatever it came in.
Frequently asked questions
What should you eat when hungover? Something salty, something bland, and fluid alongside — broth, eggs, toast, fruit. No food has ever been shown in a trial to reduce hangover severity, so treat any confident ranking as folklore.
Does greasy food help a hangover? There is no evidence it does, and a reasonable mechanism for it making nausea worse on an irritated stomach. It helps because it is food and it is salty, not because it is greasy.
Do eggs help a hangover? Not on the cysteine argument people make. A whole egg has around 130mg of cysteine; the only supportive trial used 600–1,200mg of the purified form. Eggs are a good breakfast for ordinary reasons.
What should I eat if I feel too sick to eat? Start small — dry toast, a banana, broth — and sip fluid rather than gulping it. Ginger is worth trying, with the caveat that its evidence comes from other kinds of nausea.
Does eating cure a hangover? No. Eating addresses the parts of feeling bad that relate to fluid, salt and an empty stomach. It does not touch the sleep you lost or the inflammatory response, which are the larger drivers.
Is it better to eat before drinking or after? Before does more measurable work, because it slows alcohol absorption. We have written that one up separately.
Where Snake Oil fits
Food covers most of this, and if you have made yourself a salty breakfast with fruit and a glass of water, you are doing the job.
What a drink mix adds is a known quantity, drinkable at 8am when cooking is not going to happen: 370mg of sodium with 5g of carbohydrate to help it absorb, and the minerals and vitamins alongside it.† Measured, rather than guessed at with the salt shaker.
It goes alongside a meal rather than instead of one. And it is subject to the same caveat as everything else on this page: no product in this category, ours included, has good trial evidence behind it for hangover outcomes.
†These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Related reading: What to eat before drinking · The best drink for a hangover