Tag: alcohol

Science: Booze is good for your brain

Large amounts of alcohol are known to have an ill effect on the brain (aside from headaches), but new research suggests that lower amounts can actually improve your brain function. That’s right, booze not only makes you feel smarter, it might actually make you smarter, too.

Researchers have found that lower amounts of alcohol, we’re talking a drink or two tops, can help improve the function of the glymphatic system, which helps clear waste from the body. Mice that were given small amounts of booze showed had less inflamed glial cells in the brain than mice that weren’t given a drop. Meaning, the alcohol actually helped the mice clean their brains faster than if they’d just stayed sober.

So if your brain could use a good cleaning, maybe relax with a couple drinks and let the booze do the work.

Take it from Snee: Keep calm and drink

"According to your answers, you drank lllllllllllllllllllllllllllll rumrunners last night."
“According to your answers, you drank lllllllllllllllllllllllllllll rumrunners last night.”

Something is amiss in the United Kingdom. University College London researchers tried to reconcile alcohol sales with the amounts people claimed to drink in surveys, but the numbers just don’t match up. Nearly half of all booze sold in the U.K. is unaccounted for.

So, where did it go? A lesser writer might just chalk this up to people under-reporting what they drink, what business is it of yours, jack? And it makes some sense — anyone who’s ever been asked by a professor how much they’ve had to drink is more likely to low-ball that figure.

But, that still wouldn’t add up to twice as much booze sold as drunk. What the hell is going on in Merry Olde England? Let’s just say I have a few ideas … Continue reading Take it from Snee: Keep calm and drink

Stop boring your kids

They both died from an overdose back in season six.
They both died from an overdose back in season six.

Parents who tell their kids cautionary tales about their previous drug, tobacco and alcohol use may be counter-intuitively driving those kids to the (prescription) bottle. That’s according to a new study that found that “the more often the parents talked about regret over their own use, the bad things that happened, and that they’d never use it again, the students were more likely to report pro-substance-use beliefs.”

The researchers didn’t find a direct link between boring your kids with tales of your youth and their need for a drink afterwards, just an interesting correlation. However, the Guys feel it is safe to say that you should never try to relate to a teenager. They may look human, but that’s just what they want you to think.

In the war for a buzz, an important battle has been won

Affordable health care? Improving public education? Bah, those are unimportant things we’ll get around to fixing. But threaten to lower the alcohol content in Maker’s Mark, and America will fight you.

Last week, Maker’s Mark, makers of Maker’s Mark bourbon, said it would be temporarily diluting its product from 90 to 84 proof in order to keep up with soaring demand. That’s when the people fought back.

Even though the dilution was promised not to affect the taste, drinkers took to the internet, demanding their hootch stay at the same level. On Sunday, Maker’s Mark announced that they scuttled plans to dilute any more bottles.

Let’s stagger on to Jack Daniel’s, citizens!

Diet drinks: more evil than previously thought

There's such a thing as too much dieting ... or too drunk.
There’s such a thing as too much dieting … or being too drunk.

We already knew that diet drinks — especially diet fruit punch — are depressing. (Or that depressing people drink them.) But, now we’ve discovered that diet drinks are also trying to get you drunk.

A recent study found that using diet drinks as a mixer gave drinkers a higher BAC than those drinking the same amount with regular mixers. The key is calories, which help absorb alcohol and slow down its release into the bloodstream. Diet drinks, however, have reduced or no calories, which means the alcohol is on an expressway to Karaoke Town (population: you and Randy Newman songs).

What concerned researchers is that women are more likely to order diet mixed drinks. We should have known: diet drinks are trying to get your girlfriend drunk.

Packing on the rounds

“And I’m sleepy because of tryptophan, not because I’m drunk. Assh%le.”

As we gear up for extended visits with family, part of those preparations is to stock the fridge or cooler with the sweet, cool nectar of the gods: booze. Of course, alcohol certainly didn’t stop history’s most dysfunctional family, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome, from fighting over turkey legs. And it definitely won’t help you keep off those excess holiday pounds, no matter how much you throw up later.

A recent study shows that the average American consumes about 100 calories of alcohol daily. 20 percent of men and 16 percent of women, however, drink more than 300 calories’ worth a day, proving they’re — in every sense — not lightweights.

So, if you’re trying to cut soda out of your diet with booze this week, you’ll need to cut back on stuffing, too, because a 12-ounce can of Coke has nearly the same amount of calories as the equivalent beer or a 5-ounce glass of wine. Or, you could drink so much that you don’t want to eat at all.

Baby Merlot now serving Toddler Wine

Frequent readers already know that The Guys are entrepreneurs. We entered the booze business recently by selling Baby Merlot, a brand of wine that trains future drinkers in the womb so that they’ll be more advanced than their wine cooler-sipping peers in Kindergarten.

We’re no proud to introduce phase two: Toddler Wine. Toddler Wine is available in white, red or blush and is served in mommy’s glass. This will help mommy share sips of her wine with her toddler, fostering shared interests, all while keeping Junior in training for the big league drinks in high school. Basically, if Baby Merlot is our Childhood Development program’s Baby Mozart, then Toddler Wine is our Sesame Street.

But what about after the toddler years? The Guys are busy in our lab, trying on each other’s coats. And also working out the kinks in our beer and liquor programs.

Warm face, lubricated heart

Greek researchers have devised a new method for identifying drunks: thermal scanning their faces.

Every drinker has 20 points on their face that warm up when booze is consumed, and the more you drink, the more those spots heat up. And, of those spots, certain ones heat up more than others, indicating just how many sheets you’ve hoisted into the wind. Your nose, for example, gets considerably warmer than your forehead once you begin to tie one on in earnest.

So, if you’re looking to elude capture in the future, Space Drinkers, you’ll just have to cut off your head. Hopefully, medical science will allow that; otherwise, you can only do it once.

We could use a drink after reading this

New research indicates that heavy drinkers may have a harder time recovering from traumatic events. Not only that, but they’re also more likely to experience them because, you know, booze.

The University of North Carolina School of Medicine study consisted of two groups of mice — one that had been drinking very heavily and one that silently judged the drinkers and hoped they would die in a car crash. Each were exposed to a certain sound, accompanied by electrical shocks.

After a while, the scientists backed off on the shocks, merely playing the sound that the mice had come to associate with the wrath of God or, at the very least, Emperor Palpatine. The non-drinking mice recovered quickly, no longer fearing the sound. Meanwhile, the boozing mice still feared the sound and froze every time it played.

We’re dubbing this the Chumbawamba Effect.

Baby Merlot gets go-ahead from Danish doctors

As you may recall, we recently unveiled the latest tool in pre-child rearing: Baby Merlot. Applied to the womb, Baby Merlot prepares your zygote for a life of being awesome and fun at Happy Hour.

And guess what, naysayeers? It’s totally OK for them, too. According to research conducted on Danish mothers and their children (meaning no future American workers were put in jeopardy), “low to moderate weekly drinking in early pregnancy had no significant effect on neurodevelopment of children aged five years, nor did binge drinking.” Those five-year-olds, in fact, had the same test scores as kids from abstaining mothers, but just imagine if there was a shots category.

The only kids whose performance was impacted negatively were those of regular heavy drinkers, or mothers who consumed 9 or more drinks a week. That’s why all boxes of Baby Merlot prominently display a warning not to use it on your baby more than eight times a week. SeriouslyGuys, we care about your fetus.