The people who never get hangovers

Across various studies, about one-quarter of people on average did not feel hungover

- Dani Blum

NEW YORK - Just once, Mr Matthew Slater would like to experience a hangover. But even if the 34-year-old finishes a bottle of vodka, he still wakes up feeling fine the next day.

"Unless they know me, people don't really believe me," Mr Slater said. "It's just kind of assumed that when you drink a bunch of poison, your body is going to react."

Mr Daniel Adams, 23, has also never felt queasy or shaky the morning after a night out. One night in March, he drank a six-pack of Budweiser, then a six-pack of Coors Light, then a few shots.

The next morning, while his friends groaned, he woke up at 6.30am and ran almost 6.5km.

Scientists have a term for people like Mr Slater and Mr Adams: "hangover resistant".

And over the last decade and a half, researchers have tried to understand why some people feel weary and wrung-out the day after drinking - and others feel nothing at all.

It is tricky to determine just how many people are truly hangover resistant. Much of the research relies on trial participants to describe the agony of their own hangovers, a subjective measure. After all, a headache that feels excruciating to one person might not seem worth mentioning to another.

One of the first studies to show the prevalence of hangover resistance was published in 2008.