 Poll
Community Link |
Ivanhoe Newswire reports that one in five first-year college men often drink more than double the amount of booze that is considered a binge. Binge drinking is defined as five or more drinks at a time for men and four or more for women. What Dr. Aaron White and a team of researchers from Duke University in Durham, N.C. and the University of California, San Diego found is that many college students go far beyond this amount:
The men are not drinking alone. One in 10 freshmen women reported consuming eight or more drinks on at least one day, which is twice that of the binge-drinking rate for females. In addition, nearly 2 percent said they had 12 or more drinks on at least one day. For both men and women, the number of drinks could be even higher since many college students often underestimate the standard size of an alcoholic drink. While most of the college men and women surveyed did not engage in extreme drinking, 55 percent said they did drink some with the average number of drinks almost six for men and four for women. To come to this startling assessment, White's team analyzed data from 10,424 college freshmen who attended 14 unnamed U.S. colleges. In 2003, the students took a survey prior to taking an alcohol education and prevention class, revealing how many drinks they had consumed each day for the previous two weeks. Their answers were anonymous. "Alcohol is more dangerous than many street drugs, yet it is advertised like candy. It is time for us to finally start taking this drug seriously," White told Ivanhoe Newswire. The study's findings were published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. --From the Editors at Netscape | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
College men--and women, too--are drinking alcohol. A lot of alcohol. So much alcohol that the term "binge drinking" doesn't even begin to portray what they are doing. So much alcohol that there is now a new phrase to describe it: "extreme drinking."
