Binge drinking associated with mean temperature: a cross-sectional study among Mexican adults living in cities

Carnalla et al. Globalization and Health (2024) 20:29 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-024-01033-z Globalization and Health Open Access RESEARCH Binge drinking associated with mean temperature: a cross-sectional study among Mexican adults living in cities Martha Carnalla1, Nancy López-Olmedo1* , Yenisei Ramírez-Toscano1, Luz Mery Cárdenas-Cárdenas1, Francisco Canto-Osorio1, Herney Rengifo-Reina1, David Barrera-Núñez1, Josúe Alai Quiroz-Reyes2, M. Arantxa Colchero2 and Tonatiuh Barrientos-Gutiérrez1 Abstract Background The association between environmental temperature and alcohol consumption has not been widely explored despite the potential that increasing temperatures could promote the consumption of alcoholic beverages and the alcohol-related burden of disease. We aimed to explore the association between temperature and binge drinking in Mexican adults from urban cities, overall, and by alcoholic beverage type. Methods Data on 10,552 adults ≥ 18 years was obtained from the 2016 National Survey on Drug, Alcohol, and Tobacco Consumption. The mean annual temperature at the municipality was obtained from the Mexican National Weather Service using monthly temperatures from 2015 to 2016. We analyzed binge drinking for all alcoholic beverages in the last year and by type of alcohol as beer, liquor, wine, and coolers. Associations between mean temperature over the past year and binge drinking over the past year among current drinkers were estimated using multilevel Poisson models with robust standard errors adjusted for age, sex, education level, marital status, and household socioeconomic status, with a fixed effect by region. Results We observed a non-significant increase in the prevalence of binge drinking for every difference of 1 °C between municipalities of the same region. By alcohol type, a 1 °C increase in mean annual temperature across municipalities of the same region increased the prevalence of beer binge drinking in the past year by 0.9% (PR = 1.009, 95%CI 1.005, 1.013) among beer consumers and the prevalence of coolers’ binge drinking by 3.0% (PR = 1.030, 95%CI 1.003, 1.057) in coolers consumers. We observed non-significant results for liquor binge drinking (PR = 1.047, 95%CI 0.994, 1.102) and wine binge drinking (PR = 1.047, 95% 0.944, 1.161). Conclusion People living in municipalities with higher temperatures reported a higher beer binge drinking in Mexican cities. This could account for 196,000 cases of beer binge drinking in 2016. The context of each country needs to be considered when generalizing these findings, and they need to be further explored with longitudinal data as there might be implications for climate change. If our findings are confirmed given the forecasted rising temperatures, we could expect an increase in binge drinking and therefore, in the alcohol burden of disease. *Correspondence: Nancy López-Olmedo Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Carnalla et al. Globalization and Health (2024) 20:29 Page 2 of 8 Keywords Binge drinking, Temperature, Alcohol consumption Introduction Alcohol consumption increases the risks of more than 200 health problems, including infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases, mental disorders, violence, and injuries [1]. These risks are even higher with patterns of binge drinking (i.e., heavy-episodic alcohol consumption), defined as consuming 60 g of pure alcohol per occasion [2]. Individuals who engage in binge drinking, while not always meeting the diagnostic criteria of alcohol use disorder, exhibit a substantially elevated risk of transitioning to such a disorder in the future [3]. Individual conditions such as age, sex, and education level are associated with heavy alcohol consumption [4], yet contextual factors also play a role in binge drinking. Prior studies have analyzed the link between binge drinking and contextual level determinants, such as the density of alcohol outlets, prices [5], and social settings [6]. However, environmental determinants of alcohol consumption, such as temperature, remain understudied. Climate change refers to persistent changes in the mean or the variability of key climate properties, such as temperature and precipitation [7]. Since 1982, an annual 0.2 °C rise per decade in temperature globally has been observed [8], a clear signal that climate change is rapidly occurring on our planet. As temperatures rise, behaviors influenced by temperature are also expected to increase. For instance, it has been observed lower consumption of fruit and vegetables but higher consumption of sugarsweetened beverages at higher temperatures [9]. Alcohol consumption has a seasonal pattern [10]. For example, alcohol consumption increases from April to July and decreases from July to November in Sweden [11], and beer sales have the same pattern in Estonia [12]. This suggests that hotter temperatures could influence alcohol consumption, yet, very few studies have generated evidence about the potential impact of rising temperatures on alcohol behaviors, such as binge drinking. Evidence about a potential link between binge drinking and temperature has been mixed to date. A study in Scotland found that binge drinking was higher during summer and autumn [13]. In contrast, a study using US data found a negative association between temperature and binge drinking [14]. Although, the associations found in these studies can be heavily confounded by the sociocultural characteristics; the ecological design does not allow for extrapolation of the results at the individual level, as previously discussed by other authors [15, 16]. Contextual factors, such as national or subnational (i.e., regions or states) preferences of alcoholic drinks according to temperature could explain the lack of a homogeneous finding, and studies originating from different contexts could help understand this complex relationsh (...truncated)