Food & Drink

James Bond’s heavy drinking would kill him

Call it a case of “Liver Let Die.”

Alcohol would have finished off super spy James Bond long before any arch villain or enemy agent, say medical researchers who tallied every reference to the fictional hero’s heavy drinking in the books written by his creator, novelist Ian Fleming.

The whimsical study with a deadly serious point, published on Thursday in the British medical journal BMJ, claims the dapper “007”— who liked his martinis “shaken, not stirred”— would have been in no shape to save the world, seduce women, shoot straight or even drive home, based on his prodigious intake.

Bond, who wasn’t just a martini man, downed the equivalent of 26 ounces of pure alcohol a week — more than four times the recommended amount, the study’s authors estimated by combing through Fleming’s 14 Bond novels.

At the rate he drank, the authors wrote, this icon of page and screen should have been dead by age 56 — of liver disease or any number of illnesses and accidents that befall alcoholics earlier in life.

Fifty-six is the age at which Fleming, a drinker and smoker in real life, died of a heart attack in 1964.  And long before a pickled Bond finally expired, he would have been a trembling, impotent wreck.

Bond’s peak performance in every walk of life “is inconsistent with the physical, mental, and indeed sexual functioning expected from someone drinking this much alcohol,” concluded the trio of doctors who entitled their study, “Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?”