After researching every one of the claimed hangover tricks in the books we stumbled upon one with some decent reviews – prickly pear. Honestly at this point we were trying and willing to try anything as it had become a personal challenge now to find the real way on how to avoid a hangover. This had been a little more tricky then we thought, we literally went to about 30 grocery, exotic food and health food stores to find it, yet came out with nothing. After a long day out on the search we decided it probably wouldn’t work anyways and we hit the liquor store up and preceded to drink excessively anyways to end off our journey.
About a week later we were watching the show “manswers” on spike getting educated about the things they should really be teaching you in school and that’s when we saw it, the question every man and especially us needed the answer to, “how to avoid a hangover”. We waited in anticipation as they went through their wrong answers until finally to our surprise – prickly pear was claimed as the real deal. I was shocked, we were just going to try it the other week. Well it was time to find it so I went to the net, oddly enough there was some farm dedicated just to prickly pear down in Cali or something and I bought a small jar of the juice to try out.
The directions are to drink a tablespoon about 5 hours before you drink (which I will say is one of the flaws of this method – I don’t usually know I’m drinking until I take my first shot) so we planned out a drinking night to test it and 5 of us took the tablespoon. We set the clocks for a 5 hour countdown anticipating and getting ready for the drinking to begin. I was personally more excited to wake up the next day and see if this bad boy worked in our how to avoid a hangover game. Finally the longest 5 hours of our life passed and we started at it, we decided to go full force just to test this thing to the limits. The result – one of the weirdest drinking nights of our career.
We weren’t sure exactly what was in it or how this prickly pear worked but it seemed like it lowered our tolerance a pretty extreme amount. We were all hammered and blacked out in 2 hours which would be normal, but we drank half the amount we all usually did. Definitely a surprise when we all woke up the next day and saw how much we drank. I don’t remember exactly if it did anything other then make us blackout messes (as it was a while ago) but that can’t say much if I don’t remember any real improvement the next day.
Final conclusion: prickly pear may have earned it’s spot in the manswers hangover hall of fame but in the how to avoid a hangover game it didn’t score too high. It sounds like it could be another one of those hangover cures that work if you’re drinking 3 beers over the course of the night but for extreme drinkers you might as well not waste your time and stick to the basics of water for now.
Tags: Prickly Pear
