Do bananas help a hangover

 Do bananas help a hangover?

Rich in complex carbohydrates, bananas raise your blood sugar and help your body process alcohol by activating the metabolism. Bananas also tend to go easy on your tummy if you feel queasy.

But there’s some question as to whether bananas might betray you in your moment of need — perhaps even worsening your hangover tenfold. That’s because bananas contain a particular compound called tyramine that has been linked to migraines. Just like nobody wants to blast heavy metal in their headphones when they wake up hungover with a headache, nobody wants to eat something that will make them feel even worse.

But for several scientific reasons, most people have nothing to worry about. Food science professor at Rutgers University peels back the myth.

What is tyramine? https://www.digistore24.com/redir/448909/NIJAMUDDIN/https://www.digistore24.com/redir/448909/NIJAMUDDIN/

Tyramine is an amino acid byproduct of tyrosine another amino acid that’s found in bananas, aged cheeses, and fermented foods. The latter two contain live microorganisms, which turn tyrosine into tyramine by removing its carboxylic acid group.

Bananas contain tyramine, but it’s hard to pinpoint how much tyramine is too much. Schaich points out that across studies, what is considered a high level of tyramine differs by as much as 100 grams. Bananas tend not to feature on lists of the foods with the highest levels of tyramine — for example, fermented foods have much higher amounts of tyramine than bananas overall.

Also, the amount of tyramine you get from a banana depends on what condition it is in when you eat it. Bananas contain the most tyramine when they’re overripe — like, ready-for-banana bread-overripe, which “many people won’t eat, so then it’s not even a problem,” Schaich tells Inverse.

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Does tyramine cause migraines?

To understand how tyramine affects migraines one has to understand migraines.

During a migraine, a stimulus — whether it is a change in weather or bright flashing lights, or something else — causes blood vessels in the brain to enlarge and press against brain tissue, causing a painful headache. This is called vasodilation.

One remedy for vasodilation is the feel-good hormone serotonin Serotonin makes the blood vessels constrict — vasoconstriction — which counteracts the effects of a migraine. But too much vasoconstriction worsens the pain, generating a throbbing sensation.

Tyramine, Schaich says, has a similar structure to serotonin, so in a classic bait-and-switch, tyramine can bind to serotonin receptors in the brain and affect the same pathways, like blood vessels. Tyramine can thus cause vasoconstriction, but sometimes the effect is too strong, resulting in throbbing pain.