NIAAA defines heavy alcohol use as follows:
For men, consuming five or more drinks on any day or 15 or more per week
For women, consuming four or more drinks on any day or eight or more per week
According to the 2024 NSDUH, 14.4 million adults ages 18 and older (5.5% in this age group) reported heavy alcohol use in the past month
Five drinks for me would be a good date night dinner at home (cocktail hour, plus two glasses of wine with dinner). Hardly a bacchanal, but apparently America is slacking as of late.
five or more drinks on any day or 15 or more per week
What about 15/day, every day?
So this is actually an intervention mate
Thank God someone is finally intervening! Cocktails and wine once a month, I’m practically Nikki Six
I remember at the beginning of the pandemic and everything was shutting down, the Denver Mayor declared liquor stores non-essential. Within a couple of hours every liquor store in the city had a line around the block. Every news station in town was covering it like they couldn’t believe what was happening.
The decision was reversed a few hours later.
All those liquor stores aren’t stying open because of a few “heavy drinkers”. See how many stores are within 5 miles of your house.
Where I lived, the liquor stores were run by the state and were shut down during early COVID for pickup only via online orders. Those two days leading up to it had some of the longest lines I’ve ever seen that weren’t for a sporting event.
Did the people reporting their heavy alcohol use know this was the definition it was being judged by, or did they just report the number of drinks they had? I don’t even drink but that seems like a fairly low bar. 2 a day plus one bonus during the week is heavy use? I don’t think many people would agree with that, but I could be wrong.
Is that two a day 2 8 oz glasses of beer or wine each or 2oz of booze with an oz of liqueur? Because there is a vast difference here.
Measuring by calories can be extremely eye-opening as well. One old fashioned is about 200 calories.
I think when “drinks” are used as a unit, the size varies based on what is being consumed. Like, a bottle of beer, a glass of wine, or a shot glass of whiskey would each be “1 drink”. Again, I could be totally wrong about all this, I don’t drink alcohol.
The toxic limit for alcohol is half a glass of wine per year. Literally every drink you take is causing some damage. Personally I would legalise all drugs and provide harm reduction but people are delusional about the harm any given substance causes. Most people consider LSD a hard drug because it is scheduled but it doesn’t have a toxic limit and has zero recorded fatalities. It’s actually a known therapeutic for PTSD and other conditions.
NIAAA are lightweights!
I’ve had more than 15 drinks in one sesh, what are these rookie numbers?
I’ve seen this stat a lot, and anecdotally there’s no way it can be accurate. It really makes me wonder about the methodology of data collection. First, it seems like the heavier of a drinker or drug user you are, the less likely you are to set aside time to participate in a long survey. Second, regardless of the assurances of confidentiality, I’m not sure people would always be honest about the extent of their drinking. In AA, one of the most important steps is admitting you have a problem…
For anyone interested, here’s the paper that explains the survey methodology: https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt47098/Methodological Summary and Definitions/2023-nsduh-method-summary-defs.pdf
And here’s an FAQ: https://nsduhweb.rti.org/respweb/faq.html#q6
A few interesting notes:
- Among people who were selected for the interview but did not complete it, the most common reasons for not responding were (1) refusal to participate by the respondent or by the parent or adult guardian of the adolescent respondent (26.1 percent) and (2) did not participate because the residents were not available, never at home, or did not respond to the web survey (18.9 percent)
- For both data collection procedures, communications with potential respondents stressed confidentiality. Consequently, respondents’ names were not collected with the interview data. For web-based data collection, the website’s https encryption provided sufficient security for information entered from compatible devices via any Internet connection
- The interview questions will take about an hour to complete
- Interview respondents who completed the interview received a $30 incentive
How do you figure? I personally know no one who drinks (openly) this much.
4 drinks (for women) isn’t a lot. That can be as little as two martinis or three margaritas.
5 (for men) isn’t really a lot either. That’s less than a 6 pack of beer. Or like 3 cocktails depending on how strong they are.
Most people I know will likely have at least one day a month where they drink this much. A birthday party, a holiday celebration, a wedding, a big game, etc. I wouldn’t think twice about a couple drinking this much on a date night. Heck, I’ve been to stuffy work functions that gave me 3 “drink tickets” (which would have put me over the limit). Throw in populations like alcoholics, college kids, service industry workers, etc, and I find it really hard to believe that’s only 5% of the population.
It’s also probably higher than reported due to people not understanding what constitutes “a drink.” People are naturally not accurate at judging volumes/weight (even if they know the amounts) and probably aren’t measuring. Many more think “a drink” is “whatever is in my glass/bottle/can.” It’s further complicated by the wide variation in alcohol content among drinks within the same category.
I can’t believe there’s supposedly such a wide spectrum of drinking in the population below “heavy” as defined in the OP. Anything less than that seems like a waste of time and calories. They defined “binge drinking” as getting your BAC up to 0.08%, otherwise known as “starting to catch a buzz,” and supposedly like 70 million Americans drink, but not up to that level. Bullshit.
Yeah, I’m skeptical too. I live in a supposedly Mormon town, and probably half the people here drink at least as much as I do.
America is slacking as of late.
The fuck I am! 😆
How do you think I’ve been coping with…gestures vaguely in all directions?
Top 5%, mom would be proud!
If those are top 5% what are top 4, 3 ,2, and 1.
Asking for a friend.
I drink a 12-pack of Keystone Light every day and my liver results are right in the zone.
Well yeah, cans of water are pretty healthy 😉
Told the practitioner at the doc-in-a-box I drank that much and she was shocked. X number of alcoholic beverages bad! Well, there’s a hella difference taking 12 hours to drink the weakest shit on the market and slamming wine or vodka.
These studies never take into account differences in individual biology. My wife would certainly get alcohol poisoning from drinking like I do, if she were forced to choke that much down. I don’t even get a mild hangover.
That’s early colonial-American style drinking right there.
“If I take a settler after my coffee, a cooler at nine, a bracer at ten, a whetter at eleven and two or three stiffners during the forenoon, who has any right to complain?”
The Stone Zone!
I hope you work hard on your antioxidants and enough exercise.
I try. But frankly, my level of drinking (these days) doesn’t do any medically detectable damage, according to my doctor. The point of the post was to make light of how ridiculously low the standard for “heavy drinking” is, and the implied likelihood that the stats are bullshit.
You’re substantially increasing your chances of developing some form of cancer vs baseline though.
Great video by Howtown on this that I think everyone should watch, at the end of the video here’s a snip of health outcomes vs alcohol consumption based on the most update to date science. The increased risk on the chart is per year, so with with 5 -6 drinks per day any given year you have ~1.5x the likely hood of developing an alcohol consumption related health problem, like cancer.
Many have ridiculously outdated ideas about what constitutes safe enough behavior. We all damage our bodies every day doing… well, living. The art is in the heal.
Wow, put me in that club too. I easily hit 8 or more drinks per week on vacation lol. Then I gotta diet it all away when I’m back to work xD
15/week.
Yay! I’m a top Fiver! Cheers🍻
Finally made it to the leaderboards!
