Three tips to help you prepare for the big night.

This information may come a little too late for those of you who have had a heavy festive season, but the concept of “detoxing” is a marketing myth. In truth, there’s very little that you can do to influence your body’s natural drying-out process. However, there are some measures that you can take between now and New Year’s Eve to “pre-tox”, or mitigate the effects of the inevitable hangover you know will be looming over you come 1 January.

A quick disclaimer: this is not a licence to go wilder than the Planet Earth production team’s wrap party: no hangover prevention method in the world will work if you then proceed to drink irresponsibly. As a rough guideline, your body takes at least an hour to metabolise every alcoholic beverage, so if you’re sinking them faster than that, you’re guaranteed to have a titanic hangover, and only yourself to blame. Endeavour to alternate hard drinks with soft ones, or order a glass of water with each round.

And if worst comes to head-pounding, dry-mouthed worst, crack open a can of Sprite: Chinese scientists found the soda fast-tracks lingering alcohol through your system, thus minimising your exposure to the harmful chemicals produced during digestion. Hopefully they didn’t then celebrate too enthusiastically.

Attempting to soak up alcohol with a late-night takeaway will have little effect beyond satisfying your carbohydrate craving: the damage is already done. Far more critical is what you consume before you start dropping Jägerbombs, as anybody who goes straight out for after-work drinks on a Friday evening – and an empty stomach – learns the hard way. While straight-up carbs will speed the absorption of alcohol into your bloodstream, the presence of protein and particularly fat will slow it; they’re also more filling, so you’ll guzzle less booze. (A pack of peanuts can therefore stem the Friday night flow.) Ideally, those fats would be of the healthy, unsaturated variety: according to American Chemical Society researchers, avocado has been found to avert liver damage, as well as attract Instagram likes. But desperate times occasionally call for a double cheeseburger.

Dehydration is commonly pegged as the chief culprit of hangovers. But the latest research into alcohol’s toll on your body – which must be fun to conduct at first, then much, much less so the next day – is focusing more on inflammation, oxidative stress and immunity. Indeed, overhydrating just before you go to bed can inadvertently put your body under more stress and interrupt your all-important sleep (see more below): drink a glass or two at most. Preloading with antioxidants is a much smarter idea – particularly water-soluble B vitamins, which are pivotal in alcohol metabolism and, cruelly, also flushed out faster than usual when you pop bottles. Pop a vitamin B complex like Berocca before you go out – and maybe another in that pre-bed glass of H2O – to feel more effervescent in the morning.

Hangovers can make you sick, and not just in the projectile sense. Alcohol hobbles your immune system, leaving it up to six times weaker after a heavy night. Couple that with the fact that you’re usually drinking out on the town – where you’re exposed to any number of bugs – and it’s little surprise that your New Year fitness regime ends up being waylaid for a fortnight by a particularly virulent strain of man flu. To help prevent the sickening from happening, always wash your hands thoroughly – marginal gaining former British Cycling performance director Sir David Brailsford hired a surgeon to teach his athletes the most thorough way to do so – and be sure to get plenty of immune-boosting sleep the night before. The “balm of hurt minds”, as Macbeth dubbed it, doubles as prevention and cure.