Alcohol, chocolate and porn consumption jumps during coronavirus pandemic

And surprisingly, men and women have been consuming all three at the same rates during the coronavirus pandemic.

By SARAH CHEMLA
Chocolate [Illustrative] (photo credit: PIXABAY)
Chocolate [Illustrative]
(photo credit: PIXABAY)
Consumption of alcohol, chocolate and pornography has substantially increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, a study revealed.
And men and women are relieving stress by turning to the same vices and at the same pace.
“The stress causes people to be flooded with emotions that neutralize ‘gendered consumer behavior,’” said lead researcher Dr. Enav Friedmann, head of the Marketing Lab at the Department of Business Administration in the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
The BGU study, co-led by Dr. Gil Peleg from Yeshiva University in New York and BGU PhD student Gal Gutman, shows that tendencies are going against intuition.
Men and women have been consuming all three stress relievers at the same rates during the pandemic, despite the assumption that men would consume more alcohol and pornography, and women would prefer chocolate.
“Even after years of research which stressed the biological differences between the sexes, we were surprised to discover that the default choice amongst both sexes was to act similarly. The stress allows us, in effect, to see the automatic behavior stripped of its gendered expectations,” Friedmann said. “Our research undermines the commonly accepted perceptions of various stereotypical behaviors.”
The survey was conducted among 46 men and 69 women from the UK and an additional experiment in Israel on 41 people in which special sensors that measured facial responses were also utilized.
A person’s economic prospects, physical well-being and gender play important roles in the tendency to have worse health in these times, and in a recent study published by the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, Israelis reported large increases in food consumption and time spent in front of screens during the lockdown, while one third of adults said their quality of sleep declined.
Mental health issues also increased during the lockdown, said Nadav Davidovitch, director of BGU’s School of Public Health. Mental health affects public health more than most people realize, he told The Media Line.


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