Young teenagers who regularly watch films featuring heavy alcohol use are twice as likely to drink before they reach the legal drinking age, a study has found.
Researchers from a number of American universities found that teens who watch boozy films are at greater risk of exposure to alcohol abuse. This is more influential than if their parents were heavy drinkers at home.
During the extensive, two-year study, researchers questioned more than 6,500 young people and teens aged between 10 to 14-years old over the telephone and followed up with face-to-face interviews.
Researchers asked the young people what films they had recently seen, whether they had drank alcohol or if they had took part in binge drinking, as well as personal questions about their personality, social and home life.
Children were also asked whether they owned any items that had alcohol-related branding, like T-shirts or hats.
The study discovered that regular viewing of films with heavy drinking scenes was a powerful factor when it came to predicting whether a child would turn to drink.
It was revealed that teens who watch booze films are 63% more likely to binge drink than those who watched little or none.
Each child who took part in the study had watched around four and a half hours of alcohol exposure on the big screen, but a large number had seen more than eight hours.
The study also found that 11% of underage children owned beer-branded items, 23% revealed that their parents drank alcohol at least once a week and 29% admitted that it was easy for them to access alcohol at home.
"Movie alcohol exposure accounted for 28% of the alcohol onset and 20% of the binge-drinking transitions,” a spokesperson from the study said in the British Medical Journal Open, the Daily Mail reports.
"Product placement in movies is forbidden for cigarettes in the U.S., but is legal and commonplace for the alcohol industry, with half of Hollywood films containing at least one alcohol brand appearance, regardless of film rating," they added.
However, although it fared high, alcohol-fuelled films aren’t the number one influence on underage drinking. Peer pressure and being around friends of the same age who drink were the highest factors behind teen drinking.
According to recent research reported in the Guardian, British children are biggest teenage binge drinkers in the western world. The study discovered that half of 15-year-olds in the UK have been drunk at least twice - almost double the 29% global average.