Drinking down

Maybe "Mad Men" has it right.

In the smoky, boozy world of Madison Avenue advertising during the Kennedy administration, there's a bottle of the hard stuff in every office and glasses clink for just about any occasion in the stylish television series. A Boston University study of trends in alcohol consumption in The American Journal of Medicine says people really did drink more back then.

Researchers from the BU School of Medicine analyzed records from the long-running Framingham Heart Study and found that from 1948 through 2003, average intake dropped with each generation. The proportion of people who were heavy drinkers went down while the share of moderate drinkers went up. Beer fell out of favor compared to wine.

The data was based on self-reports starting in 1948 with the original Framingham volunteers. Their offspring -- still in Framingham or elsewhere -- were recruited into the study in 1979, but for this study of alcohol use, generations were divided by birth years, starting with 1900-1919, then 1920-1939, and finally 1940-1959.

While drinking went down, the incidence of drinking problems -- from job loss to drunk-driving arrests -- did not.

Framingham may be a long way from 1960s Manhattan, but some problems stay the same.