Alcohol ads linked to underage drinkers’ favorite brands

By Shereen Lehman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The brands of alcohol that underage drinkers choose most often also happen to be the ones advertised in magazines read most often by that age group, according to a new U.S. study. “We’ve got at least 14 long-term studies that have looked at young people’s exposure to alcohol advertising and found that the more exposed they are the more likely that they are to start drinking or if already drinking, to drink more,” David Jernigan, the study’s senior author, told Reuters Health. “So we try to monitor youth exposure to that advertising because it’s a risk factor for underage drinking,” said Jernigan, who is director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.