You know you want it. You’re stumbling the streets, eyes scanning hungrily around, probably bopping along to this song. Then you spot the orange neon OPEN sign blinking ahead of your like the star of Bethlehem, and all your wildest dreams come true. There’s something extremely satisfying about drunken eating, and it’s such a common practice that the New Zealand Fire Service needed to remind us: Don’t Drink and Fry. But why do we get the drunchies?

Research shows that beer-goggles don’t just work on people, they work on food too. Your appetite is partly controlled by the hypothalamus and this region of the brain is stimulated when you drink alcohol, making food look and taste better after you’ve had a few. So when you’re gazing through the greasy, rose-tinted glass of a pizza cart or kebab shop window, you can thank your brain for making the food look more appealing than it would in the sober light of day. Then, once you’ve scrounged around for some coins, lined up with the other lost souls and finally got stuck into your meal of choice, it’s these same effects that increase how much pleasure you get from each precious bite. And because alcohol suppresses fat and carbohydrate oxidation it takes longer for us to feel full when we’re drunk, so we can feast for longer before we begin to feel satisfied.

But why all the rubbish food? The reason why most of us don’t make friends with salad at two in the morning is that alcohol makes salt and fat more delicious, as it increases our body’s capacity to taste these foods. So your best bet is a high calorie, high salt snack. And because these cravings are coupled with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, you’re able to enjoy your trashy feast without restraint. Went back for your fourth cheeseburger? Ate a whole salami? Got to the bottom of your bag of croutons? There’s no shame in that; at least not until the morning.

Another explanation of our midnight snacking is that people typically connect alcohol consumption with eating. This is called associative conditioning, and it means that drinking alcohol could act as a cue to elicit appetite if booze and food are paired enough times. This could be the reason for many famous pairings, like the beer-and-chips, the wine-and-cheese, the coffee-and-a-cigarette and the bong-und-a-blintz.

But do all of these effects actually result in a bit of drunken binge-eating? Multiple studies say: yes, they do. One conducted by Hetherington in 2001 found that four standard drinks before a meal caused test subjects to eat an average of 17% more food. Taking into account the additional energy from the alcohol, this amounted to a 30% increase in calorie intake when a bit pissed than sober. Interestingly, one standard drink did nothing to effect food intake in the same test group, which could mean that the effects of alcohol on appetite may only kick in once you’re over a certain threshold.

But what if the kitchen is closed at the pub? Or the kebab shop is shut? Or the taxi-driver won’t let you go through the 24-hour-McDonalds? The good news is that these elevated hunger levels last for many hours beyond the indigestion and metabolism of alcohol, so there’s always a big, greasy breakfast to look forward to.