It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means a tide of green-clad frat bros have probably already kicked down your front door and puked in your shoes. This survival guide is designed to get you through the worst day of the year in as few pieces as possible.
I don’t drink all that much, but on the occasions that I do, the next day can be decidedly un-fun. To start with, there’s that awful, “what did I drink last night?” alcohol breath. Then, the pounding headache. Not to mention the nausea, the god of which can only be appeased by sacrificing at least two egg sandwiches to its honor. All of which, of course, is generally many multitudes worse on the back-end of a holiday weekend — like the one we find ourselves in today (i.e., the high holiday of booze that is St. Patrick’s Day).
So what better time to try out a hangover cure? Especially when that cure doesn’t involve consuming 1,200 calories by 10 a.m. like two Sausage McMuffins and a tablet of Alka-Seltzer would. Instead, More Labs, makers of Morning Recovery, a product designed by a pharmaceutical science PhD who worked at the FDA, promises to be my “liver’s wingman, bouncer and bodyguard all at once.” Enticing, right? And obviously, way easier on the arteries than all that McDonald’s.
The Problem: I don’t want to be hungover, ever again.
The Alleged Cure-All: The aforementioned Morning Recovery from More Labs. It comes in a cute little 100-ml bottle about double the size of a 5-Hour Energy Drink, and is meant to be taken during drinking, not the morning after. Which, given its name, is a little confusing, and probably why each bottle’s cap says “TAKE THIS TONIGHT” in all caps.
There’s only one flavor of Morning Recovery at the moment, lemon, though the elixir does come in both regular and sugar-free varieties. I opted for the latter, because who needs those empty calories, right?
Each bottle contains a healthy dose of Dihydromyricetin (DHM) — more on that in a sec — and ingredients like Prickly Pear Extract, Milk Thistle Extract, Japanese Raisin Tree Extract (basically, you guessed it, all the extracts). There’s also Vitamins B and C, as well as something More Labs refers to on their site as “electrolytes,” which I assume is just water and salts.
What the Science Says: DHM, it appears, is what this show is all about. According to More Labs’ website, DHM is “a natural, liver-boosting super-ingredient derived from the Japanese raisin tree, which helps speed up the breakdown of toxins, so you don’t feel so rough the day after drinking.” And More Labs’ DHM blend is patent pending and better than all other blends of the stuff, because it’s more water-soluble (i.e., dissolvable), and thus, more effective.
Anyone who’s best friends with a herbalist could probably get their hands on the rest of the ingredients, each added to the mix because of its use in either promoting healthy liver function, helping soothe nausea or replenishing hydration.
Number of Drinks I Consumed Before My First Bottle: Six.
The Experience: Cracking the top of one of these things, you’re almost immediately overtaken by a waft of what can only be described as farts, mixed with lemon Febreze. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, but it wasn’t enough of a turn-off to torpedo my dream of a hangover-free life.
Prior to this point of the night, I’d been out at a bar after work, slowly but surely consuming the requisite amount of alcohol to make this whole experiment worthwhile, but now I was back home, and under the distinct impression that I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to warrant a hangover, let alone a hangover cure. In fairness, it’s not like the bottle of Morning Recovery explains that you need to be at the stage where you’re seeing triple, drunkenly tweeting at Tucker Carlson or ready to make a Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese for the stuff to be effective. But for some reason, I still felt like I hadn’t earned my first bottle yet.
So I fired up the PlayStation 4 (as is my ritual when I’ve been drinking), made a couple of tequila sodas and finished off my night with one more bottle of Morning Recovery before getting into bed around 1:49 a.m., according to my drunken tweet of record.
Testing a hangover cure. Video games have been played, which is a bad sign. Hope I’m not this drank in the am
— Jefe your friend (@whispercry) March 14, 2019
The first thing that greeted me when I woke up around 8:30 a.m. wasn’t that “what did I drink last night?” alcohol breath. Nor was it the pounding headache. It wasn’t nausea, either. It was the farts-mixed-with-lemon-Febreze flavor in my mouth, in all its putridness. Oh, there was a headache and nausea, too, but they were dear friends compared to the all-consuming rotten-egg flavor exploding from the deep recesses of my body. I wouldn’t have wished that taste on my worst enemy. It was literally worse than the hangover.
Morning Recovery, with its milk thistle and its DHM and its electrolytes, hadn’t done a goddamned thing. I was just as hungover as I would’ve been had I gone out and drank to excess normally. I hadn’t taken it wrong — in fact, I’d doubled up on the stuff, so I should have felt something, instead of getting nothing more than a bad taste in my mouth. To say that I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to drink a few ounces of liquid and cheat my way out of experiencing a day’s worth of terribleness was an understatement.
Three Amazon Reviews that I Should Have Read Prior to Trying Morning Recovery:
My Takeaway: Should you try More Labs’ Morning Recovery? In a word, no.
Jeff’s Rating: 0/10
Jeff Gross
Jeff Gross is MEL’s senior editor for social media and content marketing. His daily ICYMI column, which chronicles all things meta on the site, is the quickest way to catch up on MEL, and the funniest thing you’ll read all day. Follow him on Twitter.
