When you don’t want to gain weight, you make sure there aren’t extra sweets in the house. But what if you want to avoid drinking too much? Do you make sure you don’t live close to any bars or pubs? Most of us don’t go to that extreme, but a new study suggests a person’s proximity to bars may make them more likely to overindulge on a regular basis.
A Finland-based research study followed nearly 55,000 Finnish adults for seven years to track patterns related to alcohol consumption. The study found that those who moved closer to bars were more likely to increase their drinking. When a person moved one kilometer closer to a bar, the odds of becoming a heavy drinker rose 17 percent. For the purposes of the study, a "heavy drinker" was defined as a man who drank more than 10 ounces a week or a woman who drank more than seven ounces a week of distilled alcohol.
Alcoholism is about more than having alcohol nearby. Proximity alone doesn’t turn someone into an alcohol abuser. Many other factors go into determining who is most at risk for developing alcoholism. One explanation for the study’s results may be that those who already like to drink will choose to live near bars.
The study also looked at individuals who didn’t relocate but had a bar open nearer to their home. Surprisingly the findings were similar for that group. Researchers also factored in neighborhood poverty level, but distance from a bar remained tied to the odds of becoming a heavy drinker.
The findings were reported in the journal Addiction and are based on surveys of 54,778 Finnish public employees who were followed over an average of seven years.
At the outset there was a pattern of heavy drinking being more common when people lived close to bars, restaurants or hotels with bars. While the increased risk was modest, researchers found the association between access to bars and heavy drinking "notable."
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