I have East-Asian friends who cannot tolerate alcohol. A sip and they flush bright red.
On the other hand, many people enjoy alcohol too much.
I suspect there’s a genetic component to this.
I notice that groups who love to drink beer tend to be much more criminally violent than groups that abstain from alcohol. It’s probably a bad thing that I notice such matters and I am turning myself in to the proper authorities for my thought crime.
Brazil has an average IQ of 87, which is lower than Mexico.
REPORT: A fear among some now is that the temporary lifting of the ban could be extended.
“In Brazil, public health experts fear one legacy of the World Cup will be a return to the dark days of alcohol fuelled violence in stadiums,” Gornall said in the BMJ report.
Ronaldo Laranjeira, a professor of psychiatry at the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil, said in the piece he was “shocked” FIFA “can come to a country and makes it change its laws.”
He and other Brazilian health lobbyists “now fear that the temporary suspension of the law will become permanent,” Laranjeira said.
Brazil’s sports minister supports the continued sale of beer in stadiums after the end of the World Cup, the report said.
Still, Brazilians appear intent on consuming generous amounts of ale and lager when the tournament kicks off tomorrow, whether it is sold in stadiums or not.
A recent survey commissioned by local brewing giant Ambev – a Brazilian brewer owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev — asked Brazilians to list their “national passions.” While 77 per cent named football, 35 per cent also cited beer.
A study released in May by Nielsen, commissioned by supermarket owners in Sao Paulo, one of the tournament’s 12 host cities, forecast a 37 per cent increase in beer consumption during the World Cup and total sales of more than $800 million during the four weeks.
During the 2010 World Cup, beer sales in Brazil increased 15 per cent.
REPORT: Rio de Janeiro: FIFA’s number two official has said he’s “amazed” by the levels of drunkenness in Brazil’s World Cup stadiums, reviving a debate over whether alcohol sales should have been allowed at matches in the first place.
In an interview with Brazil’s sports television network SporTV, Jerome Valcke acknowledged Tuesday that “maybe there were too many people who were drunk” at the matches and pointed to the connection between inebriation and violence.
Brazil banned alcohol sales at soccer matches in 2003 in a bid to curb fan violence. But Budweiser is a major World Cup sponsor and the tournament’s organizer, FIFA, insisted Brazil lift the ban in order to host the month-long event. Lawmakers opposed to lifting the ban delayed the passage of a World Cup law that gave FIFA financial and legal guarantees to organize the event, and the issue became a major source of friction between FIFA and Brazilian officials.
