A New Finnish Research Study Suggests Bars Increase Alcoholism reports BarStool Mega Store

(EstateNewsWire.com, November 10, 2012 ) Matthews, NC- According to a new Finnish research study, living near a bar acts as a drinking enabler, as it encourages people to increase their intake of alcohol. This research report appears in Addiction journal, which has followed almost 55,000 Finnish adults for 7 years. The report found that individuals who moved closer to bars were somewhat more vulnerable to increasing their drinking habit.

Jaana Halonen, the lead researcher of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Kuopio, along with her colleagues stated in the report: “Moving place of residence close to, or far from, a bar appears to be associated with a small corresponding increase or decrease in risky alcohol behavior.”

The report found that when a person moved one kilometer (0.6 mile) closer to a bar, the odds of becoming a heavy drinker rose significantly: up to 17 percent. “Heavy drinking,” meant that men were drinking more than 10 ounces of distilled alcohol a week, while women were drinking about seven ounces a week. According to the researchers, the link does not prove that mere distance from a bar alone causes people to drink more. Halonen remarked that one possibility is that drinkers choose to live near bars. Yet both she and her colleagues also studied a subset of people who did not move. Rather, the bars inched closer to them, and the findings were similar among those individuals.

The Finnish researchers also accounted for other factors, such as the neighborhood poverty level in Finland, lower-income people are more likely to drink heavily, Halonen said. But even here, distance from a bar remained tied to the odds of becoming a heavy drinker.The results are based on surveys of 54,778 Finnish public employees followed over an average of seven years.

From the beginning, the pattern of heavy drinking was more common when people lived close to bars. For example, among individuals who were about 0.12 kilometers (400 feet) from the nearest drinking establishment, a little over nine percent of these individuals were heavy drinkers. This was high compared to individuals who lived further away, at 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) away, as about 7.5% of them were heavy drinkers.

Halonen stated that for any individual, the risk of becoming a problem drinker is intricately tied to a diverse range of factors. However, she noted that it was possible that restricting bars' hours, or other alcohol retailers' operating hours, may in fact limit risky drinking among locals. Since the study was completed in Finland, one important question to ask is how well the findings may apply to other countries. Halonen said this is unclear, since drinking habits and cultural norms are different in every country.

She described,"For instance, in the UK and Australia, heavy drinking is reported to be more common than in Finland, whereas in the USA it is less common. . . On the other hand, it is unlikely that easy access to a bar would affect drinking only among Finnish employees."

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