That’s a great point. My consumption may seem dauntingly excessive to lighter (or non-) drinkers. Yet there are even more insaner peoples than I. :eek: 
Good God. Yes, I can easily imagine an active alcoholic drinking as much as the amounts mentioned in the OP.
So 10% of Americans are *active *alcoholics? Scary fucking shit.
The standard drink is a standard measurement and fairly universal (in US), based on what someone might expect to drink as a reference. It is not a Family Guy cutaway where someone is counting a yard of beer as one drink. It is equal to:
1 shot (1.5 oz) of 40%/80 proof liquor
1 middling glass (5 oz) of wine. Not fortified wine.
1 bottle/can (12 oz) of 5% ABV beer. This is regular strength BudMillerCoors; not light beer or even many European macrobrews, but not as strong as many IPA or Belgians. Not malt liquor.
Approximately 4% ABW. For people in Utah, Colorado, etc.: the 3.2 beer is actually ABW so it’s about 4.0% ABV. Still weak, but slightly better!
0.65 drinks are in 1 oz ethanol, if my math is right. Percentage-wise, this probably means 95.63% or 193.26 proof, as you can’t distill stable pure ethanol.
Does the study have an agenda? Maybe. But it’s not commissioned by AA or MADD as far as I can tell. That would be a big conflict of interest. The author of the book could be cherry picking, I don’t know.
It’s scary how much alcohol you can easily drink. A bottle of wine a day sounds a lot, but that might be 2 glasses of wine with your lunch and two with your evening meal followed by a port or preceded by a sherry.
And “glass” in this context can vary wildly. Some people have a heavy hand.
Good to know I’m in the upper 10% of something in this country.
usa! Usa! Usa!
I used to be a binge drinker, and a bottle of wine a day was nothing for me. Going to work? You can function with a hangover, and eventually your body gets use to it. Cost? Wine is cheap, and I was working. I had alcohol poisoning twice, and ruined my stomach.
No drinks in 30 years.
I agree. These stats are ludicrous. I drink a lot, and know a lot of people who drink a lot, but I think I’ve met maybe two or three people who AVERAGE 70 drinks per week! It’s usually not a good idea to try to project your own situation to the population, but this just seems way out of line.
It does seem a little high to me, but not way outside the realm of plausibility. Personally, I would have thought maybe 5% of drinkers hit that level of drink. I certainly know people that drink that much. And a bottle of wine a day isn’t a lot at all (for me. It’s not recommended, though. Two glasses tops, if you’re following health guidelines.) In my 20s, I pretty much always had a whole bottle to myself with dinner, and then maybe more drinks if we went out. To this day, polishing off a bottle of wine is just a light buzz, at most. Now two bottles of wine, that would take more effort and starting drinking a bit earlier than usual, but averaging two a day would not be difficult for me if I really wanted to do it (which I don’t.) Even when my doctor asked me how much I drink a day, and I said “Probably too much. I average about four beers,” he was completely unfazed, saying “Oh, you’re fine. You should drink a little less, but you’re okay,” implying to me that he’s used to hearing much higher numbers.
You missed my point. It is 10% of ALL American adults, not 10% of drinkers, as the thread title implied. There are not 240-millkion drinkers. Depending on how you define “drinkers”, there are probably only about 100 million of them, give or take 50 million.
This… is true. My wife is a primary care physician who has done a lot of work at clinics in underserved areas (a.k.a. urban, poor, or both). I have absolutely heard workday stories about patients who get home from work and go through a fifth of cheap vodka or two six-packs every night. I’m with you and I still think the 10% of adults is a bit high, but these people are out there.
Cheers!
I chuckled a bit when the thread ‘The Warrior Diet’ was just under this thread.
Vodka; Breakfast of Champions.
No, I got you the first time, hence me saying my title was inaccurate.
Oh, I missed that. If it’s 10% of all adults, that seems a good bit high to me. I think something like 2/3rds of Americans drink alcohol, so while 6.7% of all adults is not that much a difference, it’s enough of a difference that I think that the numbers are a good bit high. I could believe about 2-3%.
Or, put it this way, when I lived in Scotland, England, and Hungary, and in my travels around most of Europe, I was astounded at the amount of alcohol being drunk there compared to the US. Then again, it was more a general steady sort of drinking rather than binging, but still the alcohol culture there to me seemed more accepted and permissive than in the US. But that’s just my anecdotal observation.
It’s possible. Using the standard definition of a drink, which is smaller than you think for wine and liquor, I drink 42 per week. If I could pushed my drinking schedule into the daytime hours I could easily hit 70, but that just seems excessive.
Your observation was right, Europeans do drink more (generally speaking) than Americans. Both regularly and in terms of heavy episodic drinking.
I think some of this is related to the fact that evangelical Protestantism, much of which frowns on drinking, was historically a bigger thing in America than in most of Europe.
Another data point. About 30 years ago I was friends with a couple. She drank Jack Daniels he drank scotch. On Wednesday they would each buy a fresh 1/2 gallon (this was before the size was lowered to 1.75L). On Sunday they would be out and buy a second.
This doesn’t include the French 75s they made for Sunday brunch.
They both held executive level jobs.