Food and Drink

Here's How Salt Can Make You Feel Hungover

Eating too much salt can mimic the effects of a hangover.

Here's How Salt Can Make You Feel Hungover
Leonid Mamchenkov / CC BY 2.0

Hangovers suck. There's a point we can all agree on. 

"What happened last night?" a character in "The Hangover" said. 

Aside from alcohol, there's something on your table that can make you feel hungover — minus all the fun you had before the headache.

Here's what that glass of merlot and those salty fries have in common: Both booze and salt dehydrate you.

And dehydration can lead to headaches and other tried and true signs of a hangover.

Daily Mail even found a woman who has salt hangovers — a 64-year-old actress who noticed she felt hungover once a week, then realized it was from her love of Asian-style food with a high sodium content.

Soy sauce, anyone? The sodium in the popular sauce is sky-high. A tablespoon of the stuff is more than half of the recommended daily allowance.

But dehydration causes more than just a dry mouth. It can make you feel weak, dizzy and even cause heart palpitations.

Here's a good solution. 

And a nutritionist told The Sun we should check labels for sodium  because salt can come from things we don't expect, like soup or packaged sandwiches.

But unlike wine, hangovers don't get better with age. The older you get, the more susceptible you become because your ability to retain water decreases with age. Oh, joy.

This video includes video and images from Kathy Maister / CC BY 2.0Andy Melton / CC BY SA 2.0whatleydude / CC BY 2.0 and Antoine K / CC BY SA 2.0.