FYI

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Alcohol or food? Easy question for Missouri students

Posted: 10/22/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

(POSTMEDIA PETER J. THOMPSON)

IN the course of my life -- I am an Icelandic-Canadian man, which means I am thrice-cursed in case you are wondering how this happens -- I have heard some astonishing explanations for why a person might get drunk. Come to think of it, I have offered some remarkable explanations myself, but that's a story for another day and it doesn't come free; it will cost you a drink or two.

I don't think, however, that I have heard any explanation so extraordinary as that offered by students at the University of Missouri for why they overindulge in alcohol.

Food doesn't come free, as anyone who has raised a few face-filling kids can tell you, and -- this may come as a shock -- if you feed those little face-fillers too much of it, they may get fat.

When they are young, that is not too much of a problem -- diapers, diet and discipline are the "Three Ds" of raising children -- but when they get older and you send them off to college, they tend to experiment with new and different "Ds", such as drinking, doping and doing other things that are best not discussed in a family newspaper and don't usually involve diapers.

There is a fourth worry as well, and it also starts with "D" and that rhymes with "T" and that stands for, well, it doesn't stand for pool, but they might be getting up to that, too -- they're still kids, after all -- but it does stand for "Drunkorexia," which doesn't involve 76 trombones, unless you get really into the booze, but does mean problem with a capital "P" any way you look at it.

Drunkorexia is the habit, common, apparently, at the University of Missouri, of calorie allotment. Instead of wasting one's allowed calories -- the calories allowed, at least, on a sensible diet -- on something as frivolous as food, one saves and consumes them in alcohol instead. This has several advantages in a drunkorexic's probably blurred eyes. It lets you get drunk faster, saves money on food and, curiously and improbably, keeps your weight down (have they never heard of beer bellies at the University of Missouri?).

Behavioural analysts suggest that one of the problems the Missouri study identifies -- and it seems to be common among universities generally -- is that students eat less and drink more because they are financially hard-pressed. They need more money. Anyone who is not a behavioural analyst but was once young might suggest that if they had more money, they might eat more, but they wouldn't drink any less. That's not psychiatry; it's just college.

...by Tom Oleson

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 22, 2011 J12

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