According to a new study directed by psychology graduate student Helle Larsen of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, the relationship between drinking alcohol and drinking in groups may be genetically linked. In other words, those who inherit a specific gene which affects the brain’s “reward system” are more likely to drink greater amounts of alcohol in the company of their party-loving peers.

As reported in an online article in Psychological Science, the study suggests that “Adults carrying at least one copy of a long version of the dopamine D4 receptor gene, dubbed DRD4, imbibed substantially more alcohol around a heavy-drinking peer than did others who lacked that gene variant.”

Larsen’s study is the first to offer evidence that a gene influences human alcohol use in social situations. “Carriers of the long gene may be more attuned to, and influenced by, another person’s heavy drinking than noncarriers are,” Larsen says.

An article in Science News, which sheds light on how the study was conducted, reported that: “Scientists have yet to decipher the precise brain effects of DRD4’s long form. Larsen hypothesizes that in the presence of heavy drinkers, the gene variant may increase dopamine activity in brain areas that amplify alcohol’s appeal as a rewarding social activity.”

Other attempts to substantiate findings of gene-environment interaction have yielded mixed resulsts, so Larsen agrees that other researchers will need to confirm these findings.

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On a recent trip to the Berkshires, I stopped into a grocery store to pick up a pre-picnic newspaper and some fruit. When I noticed that they sold wine, and excited by the idea of one-stop shopping (I live in New York where supermarkets don’t), I reached for a bottle and placed it in my cart. When I got to the check out, the cashier informed me that wine is not for sale before noon on Sundays in the state of Massachusetts.

When she noticed my smile morph into a frown, her reply went something like this:

“You can have a vodka tonic in the hotel across the street at 8 am, but you can’t buy wine here until noon. Makes sense, huh?”

Nope, not at all. But wine laws can be pretty bizarre. And on a recent Bottlenotes post, some of the strange laws–like a breathalyzer test used before buying wine in Pennsylvania, and a prison term for Kentucky and Utah residents to have a case shipped from a winery–really make you wonder who the hell is making these laws in the first place…

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Yesterday, HealthNewsDigest.com announced that the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health will fund a new five-year study focusing on addictive behaviors in women involving tobacco, alcohol, illicit drugs and overeating.

The $2.5 million faculty-training grant awarded to Yale University researchers in the Department of Psychiatry will involve training scholars to conduct interdisciplinary research on addictive behaviors in women, as well as explore potentially new gender-specific prevention and treatment strategies.

“The stark reality is that addictive behaviors in women currently rank among our most prevalent health concerns; disorders involving these behaviors are linked to some of the top causes of mortality and preventable disease,” said Carolyn M. Mazure, the study’s principal investigator, a professor of psychiatry and psychology and director of Women’s Health Research at Yale. “Our unique training program fills a great need for new researchers who can bridge many areas to fully understand addictive behaviors in women.”

The ultimate goal, says Mazure, is to enable scientists to continue making contributions to the prevention and treatment of addiction, concluding in direct benefit for women and their families. Amen to that.

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Last week, I danced the night away at an outdoor concert in Brooklyn (the band was Further, a collaboration featuring two of the original members of the Grateful Dead). As I surveyed the crowd, I was amazed at how young the girls (and guys) were, many of them drinking–and doing drugs–openly.

Though I had a great time at the show, I kept getting distracted by the sight of these young girls and the fact that they were not much older than my own teenage daughter.

The scene provoked me to have a conversation with my nearly 17-year-old, during which I described what I saw. To my surprise–you never quite know what type of a reaction you’ll get from a teenager– she was surprisingly attentive and didn’t seem to mind that I was sharing my thoughts and observations about the concert and what I saw.

Only several days later, I came upon the findings of a new study by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, revealing that alcohol and drug abuse in young people has shifted from a decades-long decline to a significant increase in the past two years. As reported on the Huffington Post, the study showed that from 2008 to 2009, alcohol abuse went up 11 percent, and marijuana use up 19 percent. And a most interesting and relevant finding–more girls than ever are drinking and doing drugs.

“Young women in some of these studies have been shown to be equaling their male counterparts,” child and adolescent psychologist Dr. Jennifer Hartstein told CBS in a TV interview. “Which was not usually the case. So we have to question why.”

In the CBS interview, Hartstein recommends that parents do not lie to their children and that they educate them as early as possible about making good choices. I’ve tried to do just that.

What do you parents of young girls think: have you or will you tell your daughters what your experiences have been with alcohol and drugs if/when they ask?

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Normally, the assumption is that too much alcohol is a dangerous thing in the hands of a bad-tempered person. Think of those Wild West movies, with the red-faced, out-of-control drunk guy, swinging his pistols, and you’ll get what I mean. The angry guy only gets angrier when he has one too many. Right? Wrong, says a new study, conducted by researchers in Sweden and Norway. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.

According to researchers, the association between violence and drunkenness is actually strongest in people who do not normally express their anger. In the study of 3,000 individuals in their late teens and twenties, those who often bottled up their anger were most likely to be violent if they turned to the “bottle” and overindulged. There was no connection between drinking and violence for the people in the groups who expressed their anger easily.

What do you think, dear readers? Do you tend to express or repress your anger, and how does that tendency affect you when you drink?

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Summer is time for sipping chilled drinks—refreshing lemonade, cold beer, bubbly Prosecco, chilled orange wine…orange wine?

It seems that a different shade of wine—ranging in color from salmon pink to autumn’s orange—is gaining in popularity, according to a recent piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.

This new hue in the wine world is actually a way to classify white wines made by keeping crushed grapes in contact wit their skins for days or weeks. It is a reaction, in part, to wine makers in Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region who have been trying these methods over the past decades in order to give their white wines a new depth. Often tasting more of cooked fruit than fresh, orange wines tend to be unfiltered, with a hazy appearance.

But for those who tend to seek out the quirky, orange wines can be pretty dazzling. Uniquely, they have tannins like red wines (they typically need to be decanted and served around room temperature, like red wines), yet the range of flavors stays white.

Author of the Chronicle article, Jon Bonne, writes: “To say these wines aren’t to every taste is an understatement. Begin with the look – hues that charitably draw comparisons to fall foliage and less charitably to week-old apple juice. Flavors are less fresh fruit than dried, verging from orange to reddish – nectarines, apricots, quince – plus deep honey and nutty accents.”

So if you’re seeking something new and different, orange wines may be for you. A hybrid of sorts, orange wine has the flavors of white grapes–a la Pinot Grigio–and the texture of red. Sounds pretty good to me.

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Who drinks more, Yankees fans or Mets fans? Depends on if they’re men or women.  The Wall Street Journal polled 650 sports fans in New York City. Among male fans, the greatest difference between Yankees and Mets fans was how much alcohol they drank, with male Mets fans drinking significantly more.

For women, the numbers were reversed. 25% of female Mets fans said they abstained from alcohol use during games, while only 18% of older female Yankees fans (over 45) abstained, and 14% of younger Yankees fans abstained. On a side note, the older Yankees fans, were, as a group, better educated and more affluent than the younger Yankees fans.

Another interesting fact: older female Yankees fans drink the most wine (40% to 33% of Mets fans).

To all you New Yorkers out there: Are you a Mets or Yankees fan? And do you drink during the games? If so, what do you drink?

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Should we be surprised that drinking ranks high on the list of things men and women lie about? And that men lie about drinking more than women do?

A survey of 3,000 people, commissioned by the Science Museum of London, found that drinking ranked number one on the list of men’s lies, while it ranked number four on the list of women’s lies. And while we’re on the subject of gender differences, the British survey also revealed that men are bigger liars than women, telling three lies a day, on average, while women tell two.

So what else do men and women lie about? Here, for your reading pleasure, are the top ten lies, by gender.

MEN:

1. I didn’t have that much to drink

2. Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine

3. I had no signal

4. It wasn’t that expensive

5. I’m on my way

6. I’m stuck in traffic

7. No, your bum doesn’t look big in that

8. Sorry, I missed your call

9. You’ve lost weight

10. It’s just what I’ve always wanted

WOMEN:

1. Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine

2. I don’t know where it is, I haven’t touched it

3. It wasn’t that expensive

4. I didn’t have that much to drink

5. I’ve got a headache

6. It was on sale

7. I’m on my way

8. Oh, I’ve had this ages

9. No, I didn’t throw it away

10. It’s just what I’ve always wanted

(And on a side note, who gets lied to the most? Surprise, surprise–Mom).

Teens drink. That’s a reality. But now, research has been released announcing that teenage girls who drink frequently may increase the chances that they will develop non-cancerous breast disease in their 20s, and possibly breast cancer later in life.

In the April 12 online version of the journal Pediatrics, a new study reported that girls who drank frequently during their teen years — daily or nearly every day — were five times more likely to develop benign breast disease (BBS) as young adults than were their peers who never drank or drank less than once a week.

The study involved 6,899 women who participated in the “Growing Up Today Study” when they were 9 to 15 years old. Information on alcoholic beverage consumption was collected in a follow-up survey when the participants were 16 to 23 years old, and a survey done when they were 18 to 27 years old included questions on breast disease.

“Our study may suggest that teen drinking increases the risk for breast cancer, whether in all females or in those who go on to develop BBD, but longer-term follow-up is certainly required to confirm it,” said Catherine Berkey, co-author of the study and a biostatistician at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Benign breast disease is known to boost the risk for breast cancer.”

A unique aspect of Berkey’s study was that the girls assessed their drinking habits while they were teenagers. Other studies have based their conclusions on adult women’s recalling their teenage drinking many years later.

Teen years are a critical time for potential cancer-producing exposures, Berkey said, because the mammary glands are undergoing rapid growth during that phase of development. She also said she suspects the link is due to alcohol increasing total estrogen levels, raising the likelihood of benign breast disease.

For Dr. Patricia Ganz, director of cancer prevention and control research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, the findings were not a surprise. Regular alcohol consumption is known to increase a woman’s risk for both breast cancer and benign breast disease, she said, and “certain forms of BBD increase the risk of breast cancer.” And though she described the new study as excellent, she cautioned that the sample size was relatively small.

From the Centers for Disease Control, here are some figures with regard to teen drinking:

• Sixteen percent of adolescents aged 12–17 years had their first alcoholic drink before age 13. Among those adolescents who had an alcoholic drink, 37% did so before age 13.
• Eighteen percent of males and 14% of females aged 12–17 years reported drinking before age 13.

These national health statistics were released in May 2009 based on information compiled over earlier years: Smoking, Alcohol Use, and Illicit Drug Use by Adolescents aged 12-17 years: United States, 1999-2004

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Over the years, researchers have shown that obesity, smoking, happiness, and even loneliness can spread through social connections. And now, a new study has found that drinking, too, is contagious–especially among women.

Heavy drinkers, moderate drinkers, and teetotalers tend to cluster within social networks. In the study, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers followed about 12,000 men and women for more than 30 years. The participants are part of the Framingham Heart Study, which has examined heart disease risk factors in that Massachusetts town since 1948.

Some surprising findings:

*  Women have a stronger influence on their friends’ drinking habits than men do. When women started drinking heavily, the likelihood that their friends also drank more than doubled. But when men started drinking heavily, their friends’ own drinking patterns didn’t change.

* Men whose wives started drinking heavily were three times more likely to start doing so themselves, while a woman whose husband began drinking a lot was only about twice as likely to join him.

Why the gender difference? Maybe it’s because heavy drinking is less socially acceptable for women, according to one of the study’s authors, Dr. J. Niels Rosenquist, M.D. If other women say it’s okay to drink, it lifts some of the taboo aspect. Case in point: the phenomenon of the “cocktail mom.” Before Diane Schuler drove drunk and turned the whole cocktail mom thing sinister, women who liked their daily cocktail were coming out of the woodwork. Somehow, there was safety in numbers. Now what’s happening is a shift in the other direction: The cocktail mom in recovery.

Regardless of gender, one thing is clear: The people we surround ourselves with influence our behavior. According to the study, the more connections to drinkers–or nondrinkers–a person had, the more powerful the effect was. People “surrounded by” heavy drinkers were 70 percent more likely to drink heavily themselves, while those with many abstinent friends and relatives were 50 percent more likely to also abstain.

The implications are fascinating. In our culture, we tend to focus on the individual. We think that somehow, if we can just increase our willpower, we’ll cut down on our drinking or eating or whatever behavior we want to modify. The new study suggests that we should also turn our attention outwards–to our family and friends.

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A new study from the UK found that women who are highly educated generally drink greater amounts of alcohol than their less educated counterparts.

The study, done by researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE), tracked the lifestyles of more than 9,000 thirty-nine-year-old women and men who were all born in the UK during the same week in 1970.

According to an article on Telegraph.co.uk, “The more educated women are, the more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having problems due to their drinking patterns,” the study reports. “The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption.”

Francesca Borgonovi and Maria Huerta, the authors of the study, suggest a few potential explanations about the findings. Highly educated women have perhaps experienced:

• greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated
• more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake
• greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life
• greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse
• more exposure to alcohol use during formative years

In addition to looking at academic achievement and school test results, researchers gave a survey asking questions such as: ”Have you ever felt you should cut down on your drinking?” and “Have you ever had a drink first thing in the morning to steady your nerves or get rid of a hangover?”

They found that women with some educational qualifications were 71 per cent more likely to drink on most days compared to women with no qualifications, while women with degree-level qualifications were 86 per cent more likely to do so.

Higher educated women were 1.7 times more likely to have a drinking problem than their less-well-educated counterparts, while those who scored highly in school tests were also at greater risk of having drinking problems.

A similar link between educational achievement and alcohol consumption is seen among men, but the correlation is less strong, according to the report, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine.

Photo: by David Burgess, Telegraph.co.uk

Quick question: Which would you expect to have the highest binge-drinking rates: dry counties, where you can’t buy alcohol, or “wet” counties, where alcohol is easily accessible? Seems obvious that the wet counties would win, hands-down. Easy access = more drinking. Right?

Whereas I, who grew up in a “health food house,” thought about those “forbidden foods” all the time. When they were offered to me, I took as much as I could, because I didn’t know when I’d get junk food again. I didn’t know how to moderate. Seems it’s the same with drinking.

A new survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that binge drinking is highest in dry Alabama counties.

Why? One reason, according to Peggy Batey, executive director of the Alabama chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is that people in dry counties have to drive long distances to buy booze. When people drive long distances, they tend to buy in bulk. And if you buy in bulk, you’re more likely to binge drink. Another factor is that people in dry counties may be closer to wet states with lower prices. For example, the people in “dry” Cherokee County can take a short drive and save up to 40 percent by buying in Georgia.

Finally, dry counties with military bases have higher rates of drinking, perhaps because of all the young men, crammed into one area.

State by state results of binge-drinking were not so surprising. As expected, Utah ranked lowest in national binge-drinking rates. Wisconsin, a known party state, ranked highest (See the chart below).

And on a more global scale, according to the Social Issues Research Center: “Societies with generally positive beliefs and expectancies about alcohol (variously defined as ‘non-Temperance’, ‘wet’, ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘integrated’ drinking-cultures) experience significantly fewer alcohol-related problems; negative or inconsistent beliefs and expectancies (found mainly in ‘Temperance’, ‘dry’, ‘Nordic’ or ‘ambivalent’ drinking-cultures) are associated with higher levels of alcohol-related problems.”

A couple of drinks can–particularly on a bad day–make things feel a little bit lighter. And of course, inhibitions tend to decrease as alcohol consumption increases. (I know my conversational Italian become nearly fluent after I’ve had a Chianti or two.)

It seems, though, that in addition to taking the edge off and making us feel a bit more risqué, perhaps, drinking also makes us see people as more attractive, according to an article by Gad Saad, Ph.D. on PsychologyToday.com called ”The More I Drink, the Prettier You Get.”

Two different studies, one in Addiction and one in Alcohol & Alcoholism, have come to a similar conclusion, reports Saad. In both cases, men and women who had drank alcohol gave higher ratings of facial attractiveness than did those who had consumed either no alcohol or a placebo.

Sadd writes that “it would thus appear that not only does alcohol serve as ‘liquid courage’ but also it alters our judgment of others in ways that perhaps increases the likelihood of our interacting with them (as we are more likely to interact with attractive individuals).”

What do you think–when you drink does it make people look more attractive to you?

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It seems as if everyone’s in the winemaking biz these days. And you have to wonder what has turned Scottish monks and American Pro Football players–both–into oenophiles.

In a recent article in The New York Times, Sarah Lyall writes about Buckfast Tonic wine, made by Benedictine monks, and “a symbol of Scotland’s drinking problem.”

Super charged with 15 percent alcohol by volume and a sweetened recipe loaded with caffeine, it’s no surprise that the younger population is drinking heavily (according to Lyall’s piece, on average, Scots age 16 and older drank the equivalent of 12.5 quarts of pure alcohol each in 2007, the eighth highest rate in the world). When faced with a potential ban of their beloved monk-made wine, the youths shouted in protest: “Don’t ban Buckie! Don’t ban Buckie!”

In the U.S., wine makers are not shedding shoulder pads and helmets for long black robes, but they are entering similar entrepreneurial territory. Joe Montana (aka “Joe Cool”), a winner of four Super Bowls as the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers–so conveniently located to those nearby Napa vineyards–has joined forces with one of Napa’s classic vintners to make a wine from a Howell Mountain vineyard owned by Montana himself.

To learn about more ventures by pro football players-turned-winemakers, Drew Bledsoe and Charles Woodson, check out the Daily Sip by Bottlenotes.

Australia has a drinking problem, reports an article in the The Sydney Morning Herald. And the Australian government is quite worried about alcohol consumption among its young people, and cites shocking statistics revealing that in an average week, four people under 25 die due to alcohol-related injuries.

In an effort to raise awareness and curb the drinking tide, a number of no-booze campaigns and fund-raisers–FebFast, Dry July and Ocsober–have surfaced in recent years.

Tomorrow begins the third annual FebFast, a charity challenge inviting participants to “give up the grog” for the next 28 days. Through their national education, awareness and fundraising campaign, FebFast organizers are aiming to lessen the impact of alcohol and drugs by inviting people to kick their drinking habit during February, simultaneously raising money to support youth alcohol and other drug services.

Over the last two years, FebFast has inspired more than 3,500 people to take up the month-long challenge. And collectively, they have raised more than $700,000 to support their cause.

 The money raised from the last two campaigns has been shared by 13 organizations around Australia. 

Proceeds from the 2010 registration and fundraising efforts will be shared amongst the Australian Drug Foundation (that operates nationally), YSAS (the Youth Substance Abuse Service) in Victoria, The Ted Noffs Foundation in NSW and the ACT, Mater Hospital’s Adolescent Drug and Alcohol Withdrawal Service in Queensland and FebFast’s grants program for smaller grass-roots organizations.