Downing Flaming Sambuca shots at last call may seem like a good idea at the time, but come sunrise your body most likely won’t be thanking you for it. A new wave of pre-drink supplements promises to combat this, however, and lighten the burden of the dreaded hangover.

Just as it began to look a lot like Christmas, WIRED grabbed the chance to update our anti-hangover supplements feature. Since we first tested these products that claim to ease your head when you’ve had one too many, we’ve discovered a host of new products to try.  Aiming to ease the effects of an excessive night of food and alcohol, these supplements include ingredients supposedly designed to break down alcohol in the gut before it reaches the liver or boost your body’s defenses with essential vitamins and minerals. In turn, so the claims go, this can help to eliminate (or at least drastically reduce) headaches, upset stomach, and nausea post-partying.

While small independent studies have been conducted to test the validity of these supplements, proof that they actually work as a hangover preventative is an area that remains to be satisfactorily explored. However, this hasn’t stopped brands from launching these supplements that tap into the “one too many” market.

“The theory behind these supplements is that they work to lower your blood alcohol level and support your body with vitamins, reducing the chances of a worse hangover,” says Nadja Auerbach, clinical operations associate at Thriva. “The active ingredients in these popular pills include things such as the amino acid L-cysteine, vitamin B12, and two probiotics, or healthy bacteria, Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus coagulans.”

“Because they are classed as supplements and not medications, the studies to support their efficacy is limited,” says Auerbach. “There is the risk that people will use these pills as an excuse to consume even more alcohol in one sitting and not suffer the consequences, giving rise to worsened binge drinking. Eating a nutritious, balanced meal prior to drinking will support your body in dealing with the toxic effects of alcohol as best it can, however. While there are no miracle foods, eating a hearty meal balanced in protein, healthy fats, and complex carbohydrates will slow down the rate at which your body absorbs alcohol, reducing the negative effects.”

So on a cold and frosty Saturday night in December—with a crate of beer in one hand and a box of anti-hangover supplements in the other—we returned to the Wimborne Rugby Football Club where the annual Christmas party night was in full swing. In the true spirit of our (not so scientific) test, we again asked a handful of lads at the party to try some of the latest anti-hangover supplements and report back their findings—we wanted to know if they felt awful the next morning or if the supplements may have had a job in lightening any negative effects of the previous night’s alcohol.

Keen to know more about the ingredients inside each supplement and how effective they may be, we also asked Tim Gray, the UK’s leading biohacker and founder of the Health Optimisation Summit, for his feedback on each product. “To prevent a hangover, the best thing to do is avoid alcohol altogether, but if you do have a drink, it’s important to remember that dehydration is the number one cause of hangover headaches,” says Gray. “Taking supplements is great to help support the liver, but if you’re not hydrating properly and you’re drinking sugary, alcoholic drinks, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a hangover anyway. So the best way is to choose your alcohol wisely, stay hydrated, and use the supplements to help reduce the burden on your liver.”

WIRED’s Anti-Hangover Pill Experiment

We wanted to see whether we could notice any beneficial effects of these miracle tablets. And the only obvious way was to test them in a real-life situation. We tagged along on Wimborne’s Christmas party night out and plied willing volunteers with a selection of different booze-busting options, keen to see whether they could, in fact, minimize the effects of an excessive night of food and alcoholic beverages.

We included a range of “anti-hangover” supplements in our admittedly unscientific experiment, and asked members of the rugby team to each give a different one a try. Without lab equipment at our disposal, we tried to be as fair as possible and chose eight players from the team who all considered themselves to have a similar drinking tolerance.