Chinchín has spread eternally through lounges, bars and offices. Family or community liturgy, the toast becomes an indisputable act of union. A small gesture that, if accompanied by alcoholic beverages, carries health risks, but can also serve as a link to maintain the social gear: Are alcoholic beverages a lubricant for personal relationships and even an important piece in the evolution, despite its harmful effects on the organism?
The question is not new. Now it has been resumed with the publication of the book drunk. How we drank, danced and stumbled our way to civilization (Editorial Deusto), by the philosopher Edward Slingerland, and with the conclusions of some specialists on its physical or psychological sequelae in comparison with other current ills, such as loneliness or being overweight. Alcohol, present in multiple day-to-day ceremonies, remains in the genetic repertoire of human beings because, despite its mishaps, it has brought about certain individual and collective benefits.
“We have been producing and consuming for at least 13,000 years, and probably much longer. The antiquity and ubiquity of this behavior suggests that the standard story that alcohol is an evolutionary mistake has to be wrong,” Slingerland said by email. According to him, it is the best drug that exists: it is easy to make, to dose, and its effects have a “half” life in the body. “It would be great if it were less addictive and harmful,” he clarifies.
Alcohol, says Slingerland, is related to an improvement in lateral thinking, which activates our creativity, and is a facilitator of sociability: it reduces inhibitions, increases chemicals of happiness, such as serotonin or endorphins, and we makes them less likely to lie. This is how community advances have been made: “It has played a key role, along with other cultural technologies such as religion, in helping humans make the transition from small to large societies,” he adds.
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For example, hypotheses such as that in ancient times beer was preferred over bread would indicate that this desire for pain relief led hunter-gatherers to settle down and start farming. There is also evidence of animals eating fermented fruit for a brain reward, although it is not metabolized in the same way or responds to a shared act. “We are the only species that deliberately gets drunk on a large scale,” the expert remarks.
Except for the great African apes like the orangutan and gorilla, no other living thing has both enzymes that convert alcohol to sugar (ADH and ALDH). This ability may be the reason that these monkeys survived 10 million years ago, by climbing down from the trees: thanks to the unhindered digestion of rotten food on the ground, with a graduation of up to 4% (like a beer). “90% of the population became extinct due to a dramatic contraction of tropical forests,” explains Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist famous for his studies on the evolution of the brain and for his calculations on the number of friends a person can have.
Drinking is one of the activities for which evidence is found in group rituals, confirms Dunbar. Jars to prepare wine from 7,000 years ago are preserved. And it is suspected that liquors were already prepared before, perhaps in containers such as eggshells, which have not resisted. “They would have to keep them in jars, and that doesn’t happen until they are established in villages,” says Dunbar, a scientist at the University of Oxford. Not only did the path towards distillates begin in this way, but the social machinery was greased: “Alcohol has been valuable for our survival. Sharing a bottle takes on a remarkable role in humanity”, he defends.
In fact, the solitary appointment around this elixir is very recent. Dunbar infers that industrial production and cheap prices are to blame, but suspects that the rich could already order lots and take them for themselves. Slingerland, for his part, warns that private access to alcohol has historically been very rare: “It has always been carried out in a social context. That control helped to drink safely.” Today, he continues, you can walk into a store and walk out “with enough tequila to kill a small town”: “In the modern world, where it’s easy to take home, it’s become much more dangerous.”
“So easily, it is likely to be abused,” says Patrick E. McGovern, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (United States), and details by mail how alcohol has been the universal medicine for millennia, before the synthetic one appeared. author of Uncorking the past, mentions the numerous musicians, poets, and artists inspired by his presumed qualities. As he puts it, it has stimulated trade, religious worship, or creative innovation, but it has also “ended in tragic deaths and undermining of culture.”
The decisive dose
Like Dunbar and Slingerland, McGovern stresses the importance of dosage. Praise for these concoctions is based on their associative character, not on their nutritional properties. David Nutt, an English physician and expert in psychopharmacology, sums it up over the phone: “In terms of health, the less the better.” He also “totally” discourages drinking alone, but opens the door to socializing around a drink. Nutt comments on an Australian study in which attendees were divided into groups of three and found that those who drank alcohol smiled more at the same time and encouraged chatter.
“My position is clear: as a drug, it should not be taken lightly,” says Nutt, a professor at Imperial College London, who lists the cardiovascular damage, cancers or dependence it causes. The World Health Organization (WHO) puts three million deaths from this substance and its influence on more than 200 diseases. Nutt suggests that a light intake is almost like being a teetotaler. “One unit is equivalent to 10 milliliters of pure alcohol. [como una caña]. If you take 14 units or less a week, the chances of suffering from a disease barely increase by 1%, ”he illustrates.
A investigation of The Lancet of 2018, carried out between 1990 and 2016 in 195 countries, estimated that if 100,000 people between the ages of 15 and 95 did not drink anything, 914 would develop one of the diseases that are usually attributed to alcohol. If they drank one unit a day, the number would rise to 918. A minuscule increase that Robin Dunbar compares to another study of British Medical Journal of 2018. It found that the risk of dementia in about 9,000 participants was practically similar between those who drank nothing and those who drank 14 or fewer units of alcohol per week. If those doses were exceeded, yes, the possibilities doubled.
All underline the damage and the incitement to its consumption in our environment. José Antonio Marina, philosopher and member of the scientific committee of the Fundación Alcohol y Sociedad, also notes an increase in the Nordic way of drinking (“getting high very quickly”) against the more leisurely Mediterranean habit. None is harmless, he warns, but “like all psychotropic substances, used sensibly, they can produce non-harmful satisfactions.” The professor warns of the difficulty of moderation and reflects on the immortality of the toast: “It has accompanied humanity since its appearance. It is a cultural universal. It is not foreseeable that it will disappear, quite the opposite. And that is a problem”.
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