Flyby, the “Hangover Pill”

If Eddie Huai has his way, drinkers will soon avoid hangovers forever.

By Jessie Schiewe  

Think of these pills as vitamins… (Photo: Flyby)

There are a lot of nasty and weird hangover cures out there. You can drink Hair of the Dog, consume a ton of ginger, or binge on greasy carbohydrates. Or you can do none of those things and just swallow a few pills.

Called Flyby, they’re an easy and painless way to avoid getting a hangover after consuming a lot of alcohol. If you take three pills before drinking and three “right before bed,” you can successfully stave off all the shitty downsides, like groggy headedness and nausea. The capsulated pills help replenish nutrient’s in the body and flushes out the toxins from the alcohol.

Introduced in 2017, Flyby is the brainchild of Eddie Huai, a recent NYU graduate who devised of the pills while on vacation in Tokyo, Japan. His friends offered him a local herbal supplement to chug before they partied one night, and to Huai’s surprise, it worked. Even though he’d drank “until sunrise,” he had no hangover the next day. He felt great.

Huai became hooked and when he returned to the States, began doing research into the product. He discovered that the main ingredient that prevents hangovers in it is a compound found in a type of Japanese raisin tree called Dihydromyricetin, or DHM. The plant hasn’t yet been tested on humans, but a study by UCLA’s School of Medicine found that the ingredient boosted liver function in rats, helping their bodies to process alcohol more quickly.

A cocktail of other ingredients can also be found in Flyby’s pills, including milk thistle, Vitamin B, spirulina, and ginseng. For a while the company was using liver hydrolysate from “grass-fed Argentine cows” in the pills — which purportedly gave them a smell akin to burning tires. They’ve since switched to using prickly pear — a move that eliminated the stench and qualified the product as vegan.

As hangover cures go, it’s one of the easiest and most painless methods out there. And it’s not just college students and party kids who buy the product. According to Huai, Flyby’s best customers are men and women in their 30s to 50s.

Which makes sense. As we get older and fatter, our bodies become increasingly worse at processing alcohol, and hangovers become that much more brutal to endure. Most people in that age range are starting families, a time in one’s life when having a drink or two is probably more tempting than normal. With such regimented schedules, they probably also know ahead of time when they’re going to get wasted. Flyby allows them to let their hair down for a night without worrying about repercussions in the morning.

As one former-skeptic-turned-convinced-customer wrote in an Amazon review:

“We call them our magical unicorn pills.”

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