I ran across this article in The
Charlotte Observer, it has a lot of very interesting information I thought you might enjoy reading.
While
we don't recommend that you "binge drink through New Year's," there's
no doubt that the holidays have traditionally been a time for boozing it up.
For instance, considering the total monthly alcohol sales in the United States,
you may detect a seasonal trend - the spikes in December of each year.
We're
not just buying booze during the holidays, of course - we're guzzling it down,
too. Various direct and indirect measures of alcohol consumption, including
breathalyzer data, Web searches for hangover relief and alcohol-related traffic
deaths all suggest that peak American drinking happens between Thanksgiving and
New Year's.
New
England is home to the nation's heaviest drinkers - New Hampshire, where about
64 percent of residents age of 12 or older drink monthly, is tops in the
country. Vermont, Maine and Connecticut also come in at drinking rates above 60
percent. Hard-drinking cheeseheads in Wisconsin see to it that their home is
the only Midwestern state in the top tier of American drinkers.
The
next tier of heavy drinking states are all in the northern part of the country.
Some researchers posit that there may be a relationship between heavy drinking
and latitude - at the country level, alcohol consumption tends to increase the
farther you get away from the equator. This could be a function of the
potential for boredom and depression during winter months when the nights are
long, the days are short, and baby it's cold outside - for a prime example of
this, see recent stories involving alcohol and misconduct among people who live
in Antarctica.
Read
more here:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article122829154.html#storylink=cpy
