Drinking scenes in movies ‘double alcohol use in people’

Wellington: A Netherlands-based professor has said that exposure to alcohol marketing and films with images of sexy drinking could entice people to drink twice as much as they normally would.

Forty male university students from the Netherlands were split randomly into two groups. One watched an hour of ‘40 Days and 40 Nights’, which included three scenes of drinking and 15 additional alcohol images. The other watched an hour of ‘American Pie 2’, which had 18 scenes of drinking and 23 extra alcohol-related images. Those who watched ‘American Pie 2’ and saw the alcohol commercial had 2.98 drinks on average, almost twice as many as the 1.51 drinks consumed by those that saw ‘40 Days and 40 Nights’ and watched the advertisement that had nothing to do with alcohol. "Advertising and imagery have a major impact on the real-time drinking of young people," New Zealand Herald quoted Prof Peter Anderson, one of the leading public health authorities on alcohol in the world, as saying. The results were presented to the Politics of Alcohol conference in Wellington recently. ANI