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Science & Nature
Booze and Consequences
"Homer Simpson once called alcohol 'the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems'. Recent studies offer evidence to buttress that assertion in its entirety. A glass of beer or wine a day may sharpen your mind, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study, which reports that women who imbibed daily lowered their risk of memory loss and senility in old age by about 15 percent. But too much alcohol (enough to acquire a pair of 'beer goggles', shall we say?) has different and less desirable consequences -- or so suggests a study by three NBER economists, which finds that disincentives to drink may significantly reduce gonorrhea rates among young men. Working with infection data from Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the authors report that every 10 percent increase in the excise tax on beer reduces the gonorrhea rate by 4.7 percent among males aged fifteen to nineteen, and by 4.1 percent among those aged twenty to twenty-four. In addition, males aged fifteen to nineteen in states with zero-tolerance drunk-driving laws had gonorrhea rates seven to eight percent lower than those of males in other states. (Interestingly, neither factor had a significant impact on female infection rates.) For those who don't know when to say when, perhaps a compromise is in order -- namely, non-alcoholic beer, which is neither mind-sharpening nor STD-increasing but may, according to a Japanese study using lab mice, offer protection against cancer."
--- "Alcohol Consumption and Cognition", NEIM, "An Investigation of the Effects of Alcohol Policies on Youth STDs", NBER, "Inhibitory Effects of Heterocyclic Amine-Induced DNA Adduct Formation in Mouse Liver and Lungs by Beer", Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
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