Why Your Girlfriend Can't Drink Like you Can

​You may be able to down a few six packs on the weekend, but that doesn’t mean your girlfriend can, or should. A study recently released by researchers from the University of California at San Diego and Stanford University shows that drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, or binge drinking, negatively affects women and teenaged girls far more than it harms males. The study defined excessive binge drinking as having four or more drinks daily for women and five or more daily drinks for men. When the researchers looked at the brain scans they found that females who binge-drink showed impaired activity in several critical regions of the brain.
 
Male binge-drinkers also showed some differences in brain activity when compared to their non-drinking counterparts, but the men definitely showed less abnormality than seen in women. The study’s authors stated that the differences in brain activity were linked to worse performance on tests measuring attention and working memory ability, suggesting that females are more vulnerable to the negative effects of heavy alcohol use.
 
The new findings mirror the adverse affects found in adult alcoholics of both sexes and confirm that while both are adversely affected by heavy drinking, women seem to be more at risk than men to lasting negative effects on the brain. Other reasons for the difference are thought to be that girls have slower rates of metabolism, higher body fat ratios, and lower average body weights than males of similar ages.
 
This means that any American girl who binge drinks or drinks excessively, risks permanent cognitive impairment. Those men who think their girlfriends might be too smart for their own good might be tempted to encourage heavy drinking as a way to even up the IQ playing field. However, most normal American single men don’t want to hang out with a girlfriend that has had permanent alcohol lobotomy, and they certainly don’t want to be the one responsible for encouraging it either. If your girlfriend has a tendency to drink too much, tell her to put it down or risk permanent damage to a lot more than just your relationship together.