SATURDAY ESSAY
WHY do humans drink? To the person waiting at the bar on a hot summer evening, the answer seems simple: drinking is a pleasure and a relief.
To the public health official reading the latest reports of alcohol’s societal ruin, the answer might seem frustrating. Why would anyone drink, if it’s so bad for you?
To me and to my fellow evolutionary psychologists, the answer has emerged in a different and fascinating light, thanks to some intriguing new research. It is both simple and complex at the same time. Here’s why.
Like all monkeys and apes, humans are social. We have an urgent desire to schmooze and an awareness that alcohol helps our cause.
Friendships protect us against outside threats and internal stresses, and this has been key to our evolutionary success. Primate social groups, unlike most other animals, rely on bondedness to maintain social coherence.
And for humans, this is where a shared bottle of red wine plays a powerful role. It isn’t just because alcohol causes us to lose our social inhibitions and become over-friendly with our drinking chums.
Rather, the alcohol itself triggers the brain mechanism that is intimately involved in building and maintaining friendships in monkeys, apes and humans. This mechanism is the endorphin system. Endorphins (the word is a contraction of ‘ endogenous morphine) are neurotransmitters that are intimately involved, through their opiate-like effects, in the management of pain.
That opiate-like all’s-well-with-the-world effect seems to be crucial for establishing bonded relationships that allow individuals to trust each other.
Drinking, seen in this light, is a profound activity. It enables humans to open up their deepest selves, giving another twist to the ancient saying ‘ in vino veritas’ ( in wine, truth).
Of the many social activities that trigger the endorphin system in humans (they range from laughter to singing and dancing), the consumption of alcohol seems to be one of the most effective.
At detox clinics, one increasingly common form of treatment is to dose an addict with an endorphin blocker that locks onto the brain’s endorphin receptors but is pharmacologically neutral, so you don’t get the hit when you drink. Instead, you get a mild form of cold turkey.
HUMANS
have a long association with alcohol that reaches back into the mists of prehistory. Archaeologists such as Patrick McGovern from the University of Pennsylvania Museum have found residues of fermentation in clay vessels in China dating back more than 8,000 years.
There is an emerging view among some archaeologists that the reason humans started cultivating grains such as wheat and barley was not to make bread (as everyone had previously assumed) but to make a gruel that could be fermented. One reason for this thinking is that primitive cereals cultivated in the Middle East during the Neolithic period, have a different gluten structure, making it more difficult to make good bread.
They do, however, make a very good gruel that ferments well. If you had to choose between a tasteless, soggy flatbread and a glass of beer, well it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?
While the big innovation of the Neolithic may have been brewing rather than agriculture, the exploitation of naturally fermenting fruits may have a much longer history.
Elephants in southern Africa and India have a penchant for eating fermented fruits and can become quite woozy on it.
Primatologist Kim Hockings, of Exeter University, has studied west African chimpanzees that habitually steal the palm wine left fermenting in trees by local farmers. And Robert Dudley, from the University of California Berkeley, claims that we share with the apes a unique genetic mutation dating back 12 million years that allows us to break down the alcohols in over-ripe fruits.
For humans, if not for elephants, fermented drinks play a central role in feasts the world over — and feasts are all about friendships. And it is probably in this respect that alcohol plays a seminal role.
We need friends because they provide help when we need an extra hand, or someone to listen with a modicum of empathy to a tale of woe.
But friendship, it turns out, has other hidden benefits. One of the biggest surprises of the last decade or so has been the torrent of publications showing that our happiness, health and susceptibility to disease — even our speed of recovery from surgery and how long we live — are all influenced by the number of friends we have.
One study by Julianne Holt-Lunstad collated the results of 148 studies of heart attack patients. The aim was to determine what it was that best predicted the probability of surviving for 12 months after a first heart attack.
Aside from sampling a large number of people, it was based on a hard-nosed outcome: survival or death. And the best predictor? The number and quality of friendships you had.
A short way behind that was giving up smoking ( no surprises there). Then, way further down in terms of impact came exercise, obesity, alcohol consumption, quality of diet and even air quality.
It seems you can eat, drink and slob about as much as you want and it won’t affect your chances anything like as much as having a few good friends.
Loneliness is a health threat in the western world, and the UK even has a dedicated minister to address the problem.
How to solve it is a huge challenge, but encouraging people to socialise over a few beers or some wine at the village pub may be a good place to start.
While the role of alcohol in sustaining the friendship networks that provide us with psychological and emotional support is crucial, the endorphins triggered by what we do with friends may have hidden benefits. They appear to tune the immune system by activating the body’s T-cells — part of the defence mechanism that gives us resistance to many common ailments.
I’ve lost track of how many times I have been told by ex-military folk that they were never so ill as when they returned to civvy street. It wasn’t that they weren’t as fit as they had been in the forces; it was that they kept falling ill with coughs and colds and the detritus of everyday life.
When I mentioned the camaraderie of Army life, the odd pint and all that exercise on the drill square, they immediately got the point.
Exercise, alcohol and friends — three great ways to trigger endorphins. Of course, like anything biological, overdo the alcohol and you’re on the downward curve before you know it. But then that’s true of everything we eat. Proteins, salt, fats and sugars are all good for you, but have too much and you’ll be pitched into the diseases of civilisation — diabetes, obesity, cancers, hypertension, you name it.
The same is true of alcohol. A few drinks will relax you and make you more sociable: they even seem to do you some good. But have the proverbial one too many, and you end up paying a price.
This was borne out by a recent article in the British Medical Journal reporting on a study of 9,000 Whitehall civil servants whose drinking habits and health had been studied over several decades.
Those who had consumed no alcohol in their 40s and 50s, along with those who had typically consumed more than the official government guideline of 14 units a week, had a significantly increased risk of dementia later in life.
THOSE
who did not drink at all had a 50 per cent greater risk of developing dementia than those who drank moderately, and the same risk applied to those who drank heavily ( more than about 40 units a week).
Drinking more than 60 units a week (roughly equivalent to a bottle of wine a day) doubled their risk.
These results may be even more interesting than at first seems to be the case. The study didn’t look at friendship as a factor, but I am struck by the pattern.
People who drink moderately tend to be social drinkers, whereas heavy drinkers ramp up their consumption because they often drink alone at home — or drink past the point of being able to engage in the kinds of conversations on which friendships are built.
It may be these results actually reflect the fact that social drinking creates networks of friendships, and it is being