Completed Mental Health Public Health & Healthcare

Changing environmental cues to reduce alcohol consumption

Funder NIHR (part of DHSC)
Recipient organisation University of Cambridge
Funding £3.7M
Period Mar 2014 — Mar 2017

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Alcohol advertising, glass shape, and bar layout all influence how much people drink—and each can be tweaked to cut consumption. This matters because alcohol is the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the UK. Public health campaigns and regulations often target individual choice, but this research asks whether changing the environment around drinking—rather than lecturing drinkers—can reduce harm. The team ran four studies testing immediate effects of marketing, advertising aimed at young people, glass design, and bar environments. If the findings hold, the practical changes are concrete and cheap. Restricting alcohol advertising could have a small but meaningful effect. Warning ads that provoke negative emotions may work better than neutral ones. Straight glasses with mid-point markings and without nucleation (the tiny etchings that cause bubbles to stream) slow drinking speed and make beer look less appealing. Altering bar layouts is feasible, though specific changes need more testing. This is applied research with direct policy implications. It does not ask why people drink, but what in the physical world nudges them to drink more or less—and how to redesign those cues.

View original technical description
Alcohol is the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the UK. The aim of this project was to identify environmental stimuli that increase alcohol consumption and those that reduce it, in order to inform practitioners and policy makers. The research team carried out four studies to look at the immediate impact of alcohol marketing upon alcohol consumption, to consider the impact of pro- and anti- alcohol advertising on alcohol consumption in young people, to look at the impact of glass design on alcohol comsuption and to assess the impact of changes in environments on drinkers’ behaviour patterns including alcohol purchasing. Overall, findings from this programme of research suggest that: restricting or removing alcohol advertising may have a small impact on reducing alcohol consumption; producing alcohol warning advertising that generates negative emotion could help to reduce alcohol consumption; using straight glasses with mid-point markings and without nucleation could help to reduce alcohol consumption, reduce drinking speed, and lessen the visual appeal of alcoholic beverages; and that making changes to bar environments is feasible but further research is needed to assess the impact of specific changes on alcohol consumption.

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Researchers

Prof Theresa Marteau (Principal Investigator)

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Original classification

NIHR School for Public Health Research - Public Health

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.