Women who drink smarter than men who do

Men and women are always said to be debating who is smarter, but science has established that drinking patterns can help answer the question.

In fact, "he just doesn't get it" may be underlined as truth by science, something likely to be refuted by the men who read this article and look at the results of what has been found.

But it's not all good news for women, as you will find by reading the article further as well.  Still the research says women who drink liquor are smarter than men who drink.


Emancipation for women to drink is fairly modern.  In fact it used to be rare even in the United States, for women to sidle up to a bar stool alone.

In fact it was rare not just to find a woman drinking but even serving alcohol.

Now it is a fact that alcohol consumption, and even serving it, is now becoming a fact all over the world, including India that  in 2007 started letting women serve drinks at night late.  So alcohol and women are getting paired in a variety of ways, including mental function.

Studies show that although women may not be able to hold their liquor as well as men, they can use alcohol to maintain mental function. The fact is that women who drink one to seven drinks per week have better cognitive function in their dotage than non drinking women or men of the same age, a recent health study has concluded. What accounts for this?

Health experts in Scotland who conducted the study in 2010 observe that the difference in the cognitive function between men and women in relationship to alcohol may have something to do with the fact that women have more estrogen than men. However, that reason doesn’t seem to answer the question completely since women ages 72 to 80 have long since passed menopause, either naturally or following surgery; so there’s not much estrogen protection left.

There are likely more causes for the differences found in this study that medical science will discover eventually that might explain further why there are mental capacity differences between men and women during the aging process that are associated with whether one drinks or not.

 The Scottish study reported by MedlinePlus included age factors as well as health conditions such as whether or not an individual was a smoker or had a history of blood vessel disease because these are the kind of conditions that can negatively impact the ability to recall information. These factors were found to have no effect on outcome differences between men and women.

This study continues to be developed in other medical journals and research, although none encourage drinking to any excess, but that moderate drinking might be beneficial in some ways.

 And, as often happens, there are conflicting conclusions between the study about gender differences with alcohol consumption, aging and the retention of cognitive function and other studies about gender differences and alcohol intake.

The Federal guidelines in the United States assert the health limits to be one drink a day for women, and one to two drinks a day for men.

The Portland Oregonian reported the Harvard Health Letter’s corollary to the Federal guidelines that women should limit their consumption of liquor because they metabolize alcohol more slowly and retain a higher blood alcohol level than men. This is probably why women are teased by male companions at parties that they can’t hold their liquor as well. The Health Letter also maintains that women need to limit their intake of alcohol because, on average, they might have more risk of long-term heart and artery damage.

 So it appears women take some risks with drinking. They can elect to risk having a heart attack or take their chances and if they survive past age 72, they will be smart enough to take over entirely from the guys because earlier in life they did not let some man tell them not to drink.  Still the CDC offers a caution.

Even though women who drink may be smarter than men who die, they don't metabolize alcohol as well as men, so the physical health factors, and the behaviors involved in drinking at the time of imbibing it are increased.  It also increases the chances for liver disease more than men.  Binge drinking is also a factor in sexual assault, according to experts.

Women might maintain bragging rights over their intelligence and offer the research on women's drinking related to that of men as evidence, but it turns out that too much alcohol has a more negative affect on women than men in relationship to overall health, making it not such a good thing when drinking is overdone.  Therefore not all is a positive outcome when it comes to alcohol consumption.