You may want to avoid the vodka in the future. It turns out that Russian men who down large amounts of the beverage have an "extraordinarily" high risk of early death. In fact, 25 percent of Russian men die before they're 55--and most of these deaths can be attributed to alcohol.
The new announcements comes from a study that recently appeared in The Lancet. In order to better understand the effects of alcohol and the death rates of men in Russia, the researchers tracked about 151,000 men from 1999 to 2010. They interviewed the volunteers about their drinking habits and monitored the cause of death for the approximately 8,000 that died during the study period, according to The Guardian.
"Russian death rates have fluctuated wildly over the last 30 years as alcohol restrictions and social stability varied under Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, and the main thing driving these wild fluctuations in death was vodka," said Richard Peto, one of the researchers, in an interview with BBC News. "When President Yeltsin took over from President Gorbachev, the overall death rates in young men more than doubled. This was as society collapsed and vodka became much more freely available."
Alcohol has long been the top killer in Russia, according to Times Live. Because vodka is the drink of choice, it's not surprising that it's led to so many deaths. In fact, previous studies have found that more than 40 percent of working-age men in Russia die because they drink too much.
"If you're drinking vodka, you get a lot more ethanol in that than if you were drinking something like lager," said David Leon of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who was not part of the study in an interview with Times Live.
The findings reveal how important it is to regulate and moderate the amount of alcohol that you consume. Culturally, it's socially expected that men should drink a lot in Russia. By curtailing this cultural expectation, it may be possible to avoid a lot more early deaths in the future.
