Dr. Keith Humphreys

That kind of is crude a question, and if it is, that's more useful than anything we have from SNPs or anything like that.

No.

I mean, there is still risk there for sure, but the father to son link is the strongest one you see in genetic studies.

Now, of course, in a sense it's hard, right, because men...

drink more than women do, I mean, in our culture anyway, and they drink to excess more than women do anyway, whether they've got an alcohol problem or not.

So if you think this is some sort of unfolding process, right, then men carrying risk would be more likely to have that risk realized through the behavior than a woman would, where there's still a fair amount of women who don't drink or drink, I mean, hardly any.

So it's sort of like the thing if you had all the genetic loading for cocaine in 1800, it didn't matter, there was no cocaine.

If you had all the genetic loading for alcohol and you've never drank, then it's really irrelevant.

Women, unfortunately, you know, in the late 90s, early aughts, the alcohol industry figured out that women had more money, but they weren't drinking the way men were.

So they engaged in a long-term campaign to

to try to increase women's drinking.

So things like mommy wine juice and those mommy wine chats online and all that, that was really engineered by them.

Even some of the ones that look organic online were engineered by the industry and it worked.

Women's drinking went up a lot.

And the damage per drink is more for women for most things than it is for men, partly due to body size, but also partly probably there's some hormonal things.

And so it's been, you know, exploitation as I see it, you know, of women.

And I notice a lot of young women now, like undergraduates I talked to re-evaluating that, like looking at their mom's experience

and saying, you know, I don't think I want to do that.

And I'm really encouraged by that, not that I want...

control, you know, the decisions we make, but I don't want them making them just because the industry slickly marketed to them, because the industry's sole interest is always going to be to generate profit.