When is drinking good clean fun, and when is it dangerous and destructive? The dividing line is mostly about how you drink rather than how much you drink, according to this recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.
For instance, recent Italian-American immigrants drink a lot. They drink with every meal, they drink with their families, they drink when friends come over, they drink while watching television. Italian-Americans think about drink as if it were food. Alcohol consumption follows the same quotidian rhythms as the consumption of pasta and cheese. So, alcohol-fuelled loutishness or alcoholism are almost unknown, despite the vast amount consumed. Similarly, the Camba of Bolivia drink a lot, within a well-defined social ritual, with no ill-effects.
Contemporary problems with alcohol are more cultural, related to the meaning associated with alcohol, than physiological. Good point.Unfortunately, Gladwell concedes another myth which goes against the grain of his argument: the belief that alcoholism is genetic. Consider some of his phrases:
- Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking
- Philomena Sappio (an Italian-American whose alcohol consumption was studied) could have had within her genome a grave susceptibility to alcohol. Because she lived in the protective world of New Haven's Italian community, it would never have become a problem
This excellent paper Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College tries to seperate the impact of nature and nurture on a number of life-outcomes by studying adpoted children. It compares Korean children adopted by American families with their non-adopted siblings. I like this paper because the data is so clean, certainly compared to most natural experiments in the social sciences. These adoptive parents can't choose the children they want. They meet their child for the first time at an airport, unlike, say, in India, where it is not uncommon to adopt from within the clan.
The paper's main finding about drinking is that adopted children behave no differently from biological children. This would not be the case if alcoholism were genetic. Alcoholism does run in families, but this probably has more to do with upbringing than the genome.
2 comments:
Interesting.
Depends what is meant by 'ill-effects' though, could be the impact of excessive alcohol on the body or the anti-social impact of binge drinking.
Presumably heavy drinkers in an 'acceptable' social context are just as prone to liver disease etc as anti-social drinkers ? Or does that open up the 'Mediterranean lifestyle' debate, lots of olive oil and red wine etc as opposed to saturated fats and alco-pops.
Great point, Mark. I don't think Malcolm Gladwell's argument is meant to cover effects like liver damage. His interest (and mine) are more in the behavioural effects, like yobbishness or alcoholism.
The dataset on adopted children should shed some light on the liver damage question, without running into the "Mediterranean lifestyle" problem.
We know that both adopted and biological children consume alcohol in the same way, equalizing lifestyles. But do the adpoted children have more (or less) liver damage than their non-adoptive siblings? Maybe the Korean genome produces tougher (or more delicate) livers than the American ones. Can't tell from the paper I pulled up...but the data is there.
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