It’s a rainy Thursday evening in Bangalore. My colleagues and I step out for a night of excesses. For most of us it’s about letting our hair down after a hard week at work. For me though work’s still not over. I’m there to knock back a good amount of alcohol — all for a story.

Those around me know that I have given up alcohol, not that I was ever a heavy drinker. Just that the more I got into fitness, the more I lost the taste for alcohol.

In the last seven odd months, I’ve barely had a drink. But all that is about to change, because I need to test out a product that claims to ensure that you don’t get a hangover.

Morning Fresh is a Bengaluru-based startup. Its product, a 60 ml shot rich in silk protein which is supposed to reactivate the enzyme that helps increase the metabolism of alcohol in your body.

Alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) is a naturally occurring enzyme in the liver, and is responsible for eliminating alcohol in the body. But ADH gets severely suppressed with large amounts of alcohol consumption. This results in incomplete oxidation of alcohol which in turn leaves us with nausea and headache the next morning — or what we call a hangover.

The drink which comes in three flavours – cola, mint, and strawberry – is supposed to be “all natural”. “It reduces the blood alcohol level rapidly and converts it into water and carbon dioxide,” Morning Fresh founder Mitali Tandon told me earlier in the week when I met the 25-year old at a cafe to discuss the hangover fix.

Tandon tells me if taken properly, the product has a 100% strike rate. By properly, she adds, it has to be your last drink of the night before you go to bed.

Cut to Thursday night, I’m a man on a mission, at a newly opened nightclub in Bengaluru’s upscale Indiranagar.

I knock back seven vodka drinks. Feel adequately buzzed. For someone who hasn’t drunk in seven months, that should be good enough to feel the heat, the morning after. My colleagues out that evening with me say I made John Travolta-like moves on a makeshift dance floor and I had a “funny-sweet grin” plastered on most of the evening but I am sure they are pulling my leg.

Once back home, I down the Cola-flavoured 60 ml shot, follow it up with some water and go to bed.

The morning after and it’s the moment of truth. Tandon’s product seems to work after all. I don’t have nausea or headache. Although, I do find myself slightly sluggish at work, I don’t have what we call a hangover. Is the sluggishness because of the cold I seem to have caught from the night before from all the ice I had with the alcohol in an open air setting? I can’t tell.

My verdict is that the product seems to work, at least on me it did. Morning Fresh is available on Amazon for Rs 100 a bottle and at select bars, pubs and restaurants across Bengaluru.

Graphics: Nikhil Raj

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