The students downed an average of one and a half more drinks during an hour-long excerpt from the U.S. beach movie — with two commercial breaks featuring alcohol — than during the Josh Hartnett romantic comedy “40 Days and 40 Nights,” the researchers said in a study published online today in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.

While other studies have shown a correlation between media exposure to drinking and behavior, the Dutch researchers said theirs was the first controlled experiment on whether alcohol seen on TV leaves viewers reaching for a drink.

“This might imply, for example, while watching an ad for a particular brand of beer, you are not only more prone to buy that brand next time you are in the supermarket, but also that you might go immediately to the fridge to take a beer,” said Rutger Engels, a developmental psychopathology professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, in a statement.

The results indicate that reducing the availability of alcohol in certain settings, such as a theater showing movies and commercials featuring liquor, would help lower consumption, the authors wrote.

Engels and other researchers recruited 18- to 29-year-old college students, asking them to bring a friend. They supplied 40 pairs of students — 80 men in all — with free nuts, potato chips and a refrigerator stocked with beer, wine and soda within arms reach.

Four Groups

The men were divided into four groups of 20. One group watched “American Pie 2″ with commercial breaks showing alcohol, while another group watched the film with ads that didnt involve drinks. The remaining groups watched “40 Days and 40 Nights” with and without commercials featuring liquor.

The actors in “American Pie 2″ drank liquor 18 times, and the movie showed alcohol another 23 times, the researchers said, while in “40 Days and 40 Nights” portrayed the beverages 15 times and showed characters drinking three times. The Dutch men said they liked the celibacy-themed Hartnett film more than the raunchy beach comedy.

The study differed from other surveys because researchers actually measured the amount the young men drank instead of relying on surveys after the fact, the authors said.

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research funded the study together with STAP, the National Foundation for Alcohol Prevention.

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