81% of College Kids Are Drunkorexic
Medscape – A new and troubling trend in which youth deliberately do not eat and then go on to drink alcohol in excess appears to be sweeping US college campuses, new research suggests.
Known as “drunkorexia,” the practice refers to a combination of diet-related behaviors, such as food restriction, excessive exercise, or binge eating and purging, with alcohol use, lead investigator Dipali V. Rinker, PhD, research assistant professor, University of Houston, in Texas, told Medscape Medical News.
Dr Rinker’s research showed that 8 of 10 college students, many of whom were men, recently engaged in at least one behavior related to drunkorexia.
The aim of the practice, said Dr Rinker, seems to be to get drunker or get drunk faster. This may involve induced vomiting, the consumption of laxatives or diuretics, or not eating at all before drinking.
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“A new and troubling trend.” If I had a dollar for every time I heard that phrase used as some kind of scare tactic to get more eyeballs on the study you just spent a shit ton of money on. I mean what are we talking about here. Not eating a big meal before drinking? Pulling the trigger? Booting and rallying? Getting a solid sweat in at the gym before a big party? Hate to break it to you Dipali but we’ve been aiming to “get drunker and get drunker faster” since the first time we ever took a sip of beer. Only thing shocking about this study is that it was only 81% of people, not 100.
The study included 1184 college students from the University of Houston and from a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace. All participants completed a Web-based survey. They had to have engaged in at least one episode of heavy drinking in the past 30 days. An episode of heavy drinking was defined as having four or more drinks in one sitting for women and five or more drinks in one sitting for men.
The mean age of participants was 22.3 years. Almost 60% were women, and almost two thirds (63.3%) were white.
Results showed that 81% of the sample reported engaging in at least one drunkorexia behavior once in the past 3 months.
I’ll admit, things got a little out of hand for a while there. With the butt chugs, butt funneling, alcohol tampons up the butt, alcohol eye drops, bath salt cocktails and so on and so on. That was pretty crazy. That was what you could definitely call risky behavior. But keeping the carb count down during your pregame meal so that you can get absolutely fucking obliterated in an hour ain’t nothing new.
Plus did you even follow up to see how many of these kids got late-night McD’s after the “binge session”? You didn’t, did you? Everybody knows that’s the move. Drink on a half-full stomach then crush 20 nugget meals and double cheeseburgers at like 4 AM. Seriously act like you’ve been 18-35 one time for me.
PS,
Finally…an eating disorder for men.
She said she was surprised that it is not just young women who engage in drunkorexia.
“Our study suggested that males are just as likely, if not more likely, to engage in these behaviors. We suspect that this is because men, in general, just tend to engage in riskier drinking behaviors than women.”