There is an answer to this question, but you’ll have to read on to find the answer (don’t cheat)…

Needless to say, the glass wine bottle reigns supreme. There has, however, been an increase in the types of containers storing wine in recent years. And it keeps on evolving.

For a long time, boxed wine has been looked down upon. But the quality of the wine has recently risen. Eric Asimov of the NYT explains the reasons in his piece, ”Reconsidering Boxed Wine.” Greater acceptance of the boxed wine notion is also good news if you’re counting carbon footprints–according to the Journal of Wine Research, shipping boxed wine produces half as many gas emissions as transporting heavier glass bottles.

Along with boxes, came the can. In a recent article on nytimes.com, “Cans of Wine Join the Boxed Set,” Bonnie Tsui provides great information on some of the newer, and finer, wines–drinkable not from a Bordeaux or Burgundy-shaped bottle, but rather from a specially-lined aluminum can.

Wine in a can isn’t entirely new, Tsui points out, and was “first sold by Barokes Wines, an Australian winemaker that invented a patented process called Vinsafe, which lines the aluminum to prevent any reaction that would impart flavors to the wine or degrade the container. The techniques are similar to what some craft brewers have been using, but wine’s high acidity and alcohol levels require a thicker lining.”

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Francis Ford Coppola was the first American winemaker to sell wine in a can–small, pink ones housing Sofia Blanc de Blancs, named for his daughter.

Wines on tap at Colicchio & Sons

I was surprised, however, when I ate recently at the latest of chef Tom Colicchio’s New York restaurants, Colicchio & Sons. The bar had an extensive selection of craft beers, as well as five “eco-friendly” wines…on tap. That’s right. On tap.

I’ve since learned that there are several advantages for serving wine on tap:

-Better for the environment. While bottles are recycled, wine served on tap is stored in environmentally friendly, air tight mini tanks that are reused.

-Cost-effective. Producers aren’t adding on the cost of the bottle, the cork, the carton and the transportation it comes in, so the restaurant owner pays less and so does the consumer.

-Freshness. Wine left over in a bottle used to pour wines by the glass is often discarded as it doesn’t last for more than a couple of days at most. Wine served on tap always tastes fresh, lasting for up to 60 days.

So I guess that’s what’s next…

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It will come as no surprise that drinking lots of alcohol often goes hand-in-hand with bad decision making. But up until now, scientists had yet to come up with a direct cause and effect relationship regarding alcohol and unprotected sex.

In the January issue of the journal Addiction, a new study reports that researchers in Canada conducted 12 experiments to test the theory. The results–yes, rather obvious–confirmed that drinking alcohol affects decision-making, and the more alcohol one drinks, the more impaired the decision making. As the results show, for every 0.1mg/mL increase in blood alcohol level, study participants were 5 percent more likely to engage in unsafe sex.

While the findings may not seem overly newsworthy, they do confirm the direct connection between alcohol and sexually transmitted diseases. The study’s conclusion states that  ”alcohol use is an independent risk factor for intentions to engage in unprotected sex, and as risky sex intentions have been shown to be linked to actual risk behavior, the role of alcohol consumption in the transmission of HIV and other STIs may be of public health importance.”

“Drinking has a causal effect on the likelihood to engage in unsafe sex, and thus should be included as a major factor in preventive efforts for HIV,” said principal investigator Juergen Rehm of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, in a statement. “This result also helps explain why people at risk often show this behavior despite better knowledge: alcohol is influencing their decision processes.”

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In less than a week, my daughter will be off to college. Sitting on a beach chair a few weeks ago, her eyes glanced at her computer screen under the glare of the sun and the ocean only steps away. I assumed she was watching some incredibly gripping movie from which she couldn’t tear herself away. But when I inquired, she rolled her eyes and explained that she was watching an alcohol awareness video—a mandatory assignment for her university.

Despite the efforts made by educational institutions, new psychological research suggests that the pitfalls from all those jello shots and games of beer pong aren’t bad enough to make students stop drinking.

On the USA Today website, an article, “College Drinking is Liberating, and a Good Excuse,” reports on why the efforts to raise awareness are not working.

“We thought if we could demonstrate to students that their performance deteriorated under alcohol, they would be convinced that their alcohol consumption has put them at risk,” says psychologis E. Scott Geller, director of the Center for Applied Behavior Systems at Virginia Tech. But “knowing that one is impaired, physically and even emotionally, did not seem to reduce alcohol consumption.”

Geller, who’s been studying alcohol awareness since the mid-1980s, states clearly that the alcohol education hasn’t worked. “We have shown in several studies that their intentions influence their behavior. If they intend to get drunk, it’s difficult to stop that.”

Going for the effects is what it’s all about. One student, Brandie Pugh, a senior at Ohio University, says in the article: “I think everybody’s aim is to get drunk on the weekend. It’s not about the taste of the alcohol. It’s about the effects of it. It’s about the lowered inhibitions.”

In another study, researcher Laina Bay-Cheng, an associate professor of social work at the University at Buffalo-State University of New York, found that when teenagers drink, they think they can use their intoxicated state as an excuse for their actions. Students in her focus groups–there were 97 teens ranging in age from 14 to 17–described alcohol as emboldening and said it offers “liquid courage,” a phrase other researchers also have cited. Colleges, she says, need to “acknowledge and reckon with” alcohol’s appeal.

According to Bay Cheng, another result of drinking is that it can be an excuse for young women to “act out being sexually assertive, carefree, liberated,” she explains. ”If you have sex, you’re a slut, and if you don’t, you’re a prude — but drinking allows you to do both. You can go out, get drunk, have sex and the next day say, ‘I’m still a good girl.’”

In the USA Today article, Pugh goes on to say that she has seen this scenario play out on her campus repeatedly: “‘I was drunk so I hooked up with that guy.’ ‘I was drunk so I missed my class this morning.’ ‘I was drunk so I got in a fight.’ If it’s something they’re not proud of, it gives them an excuse.”

After next Wednesday, I’ll hope from afar that my daughter doesn’t ever feel that she needs to use alcohol as an excuse for anything.

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A new study published in the June 24 edition of The Journal of the National Cancer Institute revealed that lifestyle changes, such as drinking less alcohol, weight loss, and increased amounts of exercise, could lead to a considerable reduction in breast cancer cases across an entire population, according to a new model that estimates the influence of these variable risk factors.

Often times, breast cancer risk is based on elements that can’t be modified, such as family history. And until now, there have been no models based on ways women can impact their breast cancer risk through lifestyle adjustments.

The findings provide “extremely important information relevant to counseling women on how much risk reduction they can expect by changing behaviors, and also highlights the basic public health concept that small changes in individual risk can translate into a meaningful reduction in disease in a large population,” wrote Dr. Kathy J. Helzlsouer, of Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, a journal news release.

Using data from an Italian study that included more than 5,000 women, the U.S. National Cancer Institute researchers created the model that included three modifiable risk factors (alcohol consumption, physical activity and body mass index) and five risk factors that are difficult or impossible to modify (family history, education, job activity, reproductive characteristics, and biopsy history).

Benchmarks for some lifestyle factors included getting at least 2 hours of exercise a week (for women 30-39) and having a body mass index (BMI) under 25 (in women 50 and older).

The  authors of the study noted that the predicted changes in lifestyle to achieve significant  changes — such as former and current drinkers becoming non-drinkers — might be overly optimistic.

But the findings, say researchers, may help in designing programs meant to encourage women to make lifestyle changes. For example, a 1.6 percent absolute risk reduction in a general population of one million women amounts to 16,000 fewer cases of cancer.

For information about breast cancer risk, go to the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

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Did you know that nearly a third of what we drink is black market? That women abstain more than men? And that Russians are the world’s most dangerous drinkers?

These are just a few of the results from the recently published report on global alcohol consumption from the World Health Organization. The report, released in February, delves into a wide variety of areas concerning alcohol, including per capita consumption, trends, patterns, health, and societal effects.

In a piece titled, “Does the World Have a Drinking Problem?” Daily Beast writer David Sessions captures some of the more “stunning” statistics from the study. In a nutshell, Sessions shares the following from the WHO report:

1. Nearly half of us have never had a drink.
2. We love beer and liquor, but wine not so much.
3. Europeans are earth’s bigger drinkers.
4. Ireland is the world’s drunkest country.
5. Americans are drinking less than Europeans, but dying more often from it.
6. Russians are the world’s most hazardous drinkers.
7. We’re not drinking any more or less than we used to.
8. Our kids are drinking a lot more.
9. More of us are dying from alcohol than from AIDS.
10. Women are abstaining more than men.
11. Men are at highest risk for alcohol-related death.
12. Nearly a third of what we drink is black market.

If you’d like to dig deeper, there’s some fascinating stuff in the report. And now that the results above have surfaced, as well as those concerning the major disease and injury categories causally related to alcohol, and socioeconomic differences and drinking, it’ll be interesting to see what, actually, the WHO will do with this info.

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According to an article on the BBC website, a recent study by the NHS (England’s National Health Service) reported that middle class professionals frequently drink more alcohol than people belonging to a low income group.

The statistical data collected by the NHS showed that nearly 1 in 3 men and 1 in 6 women, who are earning above £35,000 annually (equal to approximately $54,000), consume alcohol nearly every day.

People belonging to a high income group drink only on a few occasions in a week but they end up gulping down alcohol whenever they drink, consuming almost six to eight units of alcohol at a time.

However, people earning a low income are less likely to consume alcohol on a daily basis and therefore, they drink mostly on weekends.

According to Tim Straughan, chief executive of the NHS Information Centre, “The figures show the extent to which people from all backgrounds drink alcohol both frequently and in quantities that could be harmful to their health.”

In addition, Straughan said, “They show that a greater percentage in the richest households drink [more] frequently than those in the poorest.”

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A new gene variant that may protect against alcoholism was recently discovered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

The results of the study report that 10 to 20 percent of the population carries a gene variant (called CYP2E1) that makes them get drunk more easily–and therefore makes them less susceptible to alcoholism.

According to an article in USA Today, Dr. Kirk Wilhelmsen, the study’s lead author, explained that the finding, “potentially changes the paradigm about how we think about how alcohol affects the brain.” While the finding doesn’t yet have any treatment application, he says, “my expectation is this is actually going to lead somewhere.”

Wilhelmsen and colleagues collected hundreds of pairs of siblings, all at college-age and all with at least one parent who was an alcoholic. The study participants were given a mixture of grain alcohol and soda that was equivalent to about three drinks that they drank at regular intervals. They were asked to answer questions describing how the alcohol made them feel: “I feel drunk, I don’t feel drunk; I feel sleepy, I don’t feel sleepy.”

The 10 to 20 percent of the population that carry the gene variant typically avoid drinking often or in large quantities because they can’t “hold their liquor.” As a result, they are less likely to become alcoholics in the long run. The new finding offers hope for a treatment of alcoholic if scientists can develop a way to modify the gene or copy its effects.

“We have found a gene that protects against alcoholism, and on top of that, has a very strong effect,” Wilhelmsen said in a statement. “But alcoholism is a very complex disease, and there are lots of complicated reasons why people drink. This may be just one of the reasons.”

The findings are published in the online version of the journal, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, and will appear in print in its January 2011 issue.

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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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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Over the last several years, I have watched my mother’s memory come and go, lapse and return. She has had an MRI of her brain and does not have Alzheimer’s. As a matter of fact, her more-than-competent doctor has described her brain as “robust” for her age.

So, why then, at the age of 76, does my mother call me looking for my father when he’s been deceased for nearly four years? And why can’t she remember the names of her very close relatives? Although my mother is sober now, it seems that her on-and-off-again loss of memory is a result of a period of heavy drinking within the past ten years.

A new study conducted in Brazil focused specifically on cognitive problems caused by heavy alcohol use among 1,145 people who were 60 years old or older. The study found that 8.2 percent of the 419 men and 726 women studied were heavy drinkers, or drinking at levels that are considered high risk. (For women, heavy drinking is four drinks or more during a day or more than seven drinks a week.)

One of the more surprising findings of the study was that heavy drinking affects the cognitive function of women more than men. “The effects of heavy alcohol use on memory and other cognitive functions were more evident in women,” said Marcos Antonio Lopes, the author of the study. “Our findings suggest that alcohol use does not have a linear relationship with cognitive decline.”

In other words, women who continue to drink heavily into their senior years run the risks of losing cognitive function and are more prone therefore to falls and significant memory loss.

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If you knocked a few back during last night’s Super Bowl (and perhaps after if you’re a Saints fan), the upside to all those calories is that you may have been improving the density of your bones.

According to a new study published in the February issue of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, published by Wiley-Blackwell, beer is a significant source of dietary silicon, a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density.

After analyzing 100 commercial beers, researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, Davis, determined the relationship between beer production methods and the resulting silicon content, concluding that beer is a rich source of dietary silicon.

They discovered that beer, especially pale ales (as opposed to darker beers), contains high levels of silicon known to slow down the bone thinning that leads to fractures and boosting the formation of new bone. The recent finding backs up previous research which also showed that the drink was good at fending off brittle bones – especially in women.

“We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer,” said Charles Bamforth, lead author of the study.

Now it may not be the same as a glass of milk, and I may have to rethink my penchant for dark ambers, but next time I sip from a cold bottle of another favorite, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, I’ll remember that I’m doing just a touch of good for my health.

According to a study published in a recent issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, women who drink a glass or two of red wine may experience greater sexual desire, lubrication, and overall sexual function.

According to the study’s authors, members of the departments of Urology and Public Health at the University of Florence in Italy, the results help give a clearer picture on the female sexual response cycle.

The study, supposedly the first of its kind, examined red wine intake and the sexual function of 800 women between the ages of 18 and 50, none of whom had ever reported a sexual health problem. The women were divided into three groups–one group drank one or two glasses, another group drank less than one glass and a third group didn’t drink at all. Those drinking more than two glasses of wine were excluded from the study.

The participants answered a questionnaire called the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI), a questionnaire used by doctors to assess sexual health in women. The results revealed that the levels of sexual desire were higher in women who were moderate drinkers of red wine than in their counterparts who preferred other alcoholic drinks, or were teetotal.

Typically, medical studies on sexual health focus on men and dysfunction, so this was a welcome change. “Historically, the aspects of wine and sexuality have been well known since the time of Ancient Greece,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Nicola Mondaini, who was quoted in an article in the Wine Spectator and is publishing a book on the subject next month, titled Vino e Eros. “But the field of female sexual dysfunction is still highly unexplored.”

The researchers’ conclusion stated that “While this finding needs to be interpreted with some caution, because of the small sample size, self-reported data, and the lack of support from laboratory exams, it nevertheless suggests a potential relationship between red wine consumption and better sexuality.”

Any chance you’ll be testing this on your own?

In a recent study done in the U.K., 3,000 women were surveyed about drinking before sex. The results showed that 75 percent of women preferred to drink one or two glasses of wine before getting into bed with their husband or boyfriend. 6 percent never had sex sober.

Seems that these recent findings are tied to women’s self-esteem. Sure, drinking can definitely loosen us up before getting into bed. And it certainly can boost our self-confidence, reducing our inhibitions about our body.

What’s your feeling about drinking before sex? Does it make you feel less inhibited?

Here’s a bit more about the study:   Why Do Women Drink Alcohol Before Sex?