By the very thing you quoted
. Those “effects” are not the same as intoxication. Ethanol produces a certain effect, namely drunkness. The fact that certain types of alcohol may give you a headache or not have no bearing on the basic intoxication that they cause.
I’ve never understood beer drinking at all, from an economical perspective (I dislike the taste, so it’s all moot anyway, but even so, I don’t have the stomach capacity needed to catch a buzz off of something as weak as beer, so why not just drink water?)
Economical perspective? One 24 oz. can of Steel Reserve costs me $1.10. That’s 24 oz of beer at 8.1% abv. I generally drink two cans and that gets me a good buzz/drunk for about $2.40. Now Steel Reserve might be classified as a “malt liquor” but I consider it to be beer. I used to dislike the taste of beer, but then I stopped being a boy and became a man.
The alcohol is identical. It’s ethanol, CH3-CH2-OH. What is different is the “matrix”, the rest.
An example: I get an instant headache from red wine (which contains tannins) but not from white wines (which don’t contain tannins). I know of at least two other low-blood-pressure people (one from this board and another rl) who have the same problem.
Well, it does have a little flavor. Mot much, but enough to make it enjoyable with certain foods.
Sort of like those “alcohol-free” beers (which actually have 0.5 ABV) which people drink mainly for taste.
So why don’t I drink those?
Carbohydrates, mostly. The alcohol-free beers have higher carb content than Michelob Ultra.
I wonder also, Zambini, if your doctor was assuming that if you admitted to drinking 3 beers a day that you must be under reporting your usage. I’ve heard that many docs assume you drink twice as much as you are reporting so if he has you pegged as a six pack a day drinker, I can see why he may be concerned.
Since your doc doesn’t know you I can see why he may be concerned even with just 3 drinks a day. You are a habitual drinker. You drink every single day and that could be viewed as a problem or potential problem.
I think we got off track a bit on the buzz angle or the acholholism angle.
Consuming 36 oz of 4% alchohol solution per day is putting a lot of mileage on your liver, even if your mind remains fine and you don’t become an addict.
That is one of the issues the doc is concerned about.
Depends on the doc, and I would guess the general attitude towards alcohol in your area.
We live in an area where people drink a lot. Long, dark, cold winters do that to a population. Mr.Athena had the same questions about drinking when he went in for a physical a few months ago. We tend to share a bottle of wine many nights of the week, and he likes his beer, too. He was honest with his doctor about how much he drank (average 3 drinks a night). His doctor laughed at him, telling him that at that level, it was probably good for him.
I’ve seen plenty of alcoholics, and I agree with EJsGirl: it’s not so much how much you drink, but how you drink and what it makes you do. If you’re getting in fights with your loved ones, missing work, and have a tendency to not go to bed until all the alcohol in the house is gone, you have a problem. If you have a few drinks every day and it doesn’t affect you, no big deal.
I understand it works for some people. My boyfriend, for example, will almost exclusively drink beer when he is out because anything else he gets too drunk. For me, though, aside from not liking beer, I just can’t drink enough of it to catch even the smallest buzz. To give you an idea, it takes me about 2 or 3 hours to get halfway through a can of soda, and I never get all the way though one. It’s that way with anything carbonated. I can drink maybe 2-3 oz of it at a time, and then I have to wait. So the rate at which I could drink something like beer (or let’s say, a wine cooler which is something I could drink from a taste standpoint–I have no desire to become a man and I do love me my girlie drinks*) would be exceeded by the rate at which I’d metabolize the alcohol.
I was raised in a completely nondrinking house, and so my personal view of alcohol is distorted. Recently when I realized I was going through two bottles of wine a week I paused to see if this was becoming a problem. I said I’d go a week without any alcohol and if it in any way bothered me, I’d think more seriously about it. Needless to say it wasn’t a problem. I will drink wine while I paint, for example, because it puts me in the right frame of mind. I don’t even think it’s an alcohol effect as much as a psychological thing, but it helps my creative process of painting. I will also sometimes drink wine if I need to go to sleep and sleepiness isn’t coming–I have some prescription pills for this but I don’t like to take them unless I have to. I also enjoy wine with dinner some of the time, or I’ll fix a mixed drink and sip it with popcorn while watching TV after the kiddo is in bed. All of this is completely normal and not something to worry about, but coming from the background that I was raised in, it sometimes seems like “wow, so much booze!”. I think my mom’s alcohol consumption can be summed up as a glass of wine every other Christmas or something, and my dad doesn’t drink at all, and neither does his wife. My level of drinking doesn’t cause financial hardship, doesn’t alter my behavior, hasn’t affected my 4.0GPA in college, hasn’t made me miss work, and the only impact it has had on my son is that he will offer to get me a glass of wine sometimes, if I’m about to paint or with dinner, which obviously he wouldn’t do if I didn’t drink it.
So I understand the whole self-questioning of whether you’re fitting in with the acceptable levels of drinkage.
*aside from cold water, there are exactly zero drinks that I enjoy that aren’t sweet, both alcoholic and not. And I’m even picky about water.
I think the statement “1 beer = 1 glass of wine = 1 shot of liquor” is dumb.
Different beers have different ABVs, and different liquors have different proofs. A 151 proof shot is going to have more alcohol than one beer with 2.7% ABV (not uncommon in some low-ABV beers.)
It’s a conspiracy. Somebody’s telling the Doctors that if they tell anyone they can drink more than one drink a day, they’ll yank their license.
OK, I exaggerate, but I sense a line is being toed and it’s not medical in nature.
Re quick drunkenness: If you drink three beers in half an hour, that’s 36 ounces. Three glasses of wine is only 12. All that extra liquid, I think, would take longer to be absorbed. (I assume your stomach isn’t selecting only the alcohol.) If so, your blood alcohol would spike up more quickly with the wine. The test, of course, would be to try three shots in half an hour and observe the effect. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, since I rarely have three drinks in an evening, much less in half an hour.
I mentioned that to the doctor, about the different ABVs.
Is one bottle of Michelob Ultra supposed to be considered equal to a bottle of Mickey’s or Grolsch?
He sais I was “rationalizing”.
Alcohol has other affects on your body besides making you drunk. The Dr. did not say you were an alcoholic or addicted in any way, just that you were considered a heavy drinker by medical standards, not social ones. Even if you are not addicted, your liver could be being harmed and / or risks for disease increased. IANAD and I don’t know what effects this kind of long term drinking can do, but it may be that he is more concerned about that than the alcoholic aspect of it.
The medical standard is probably based on studies that show an amount of alcohol that is say, safe or even beneficial to most people, and an amount that once crossed, put the person at higher risk for disease. That does not mean that person is addicted or that other people would consider him a drunk, just that he is consuming enough alcohol to increase his risks of XYZ or whatever. Again, I am not familiar with how the standards were created, maybe an MD like QtM could help more with that.
The ABVs aren’t that different and since your doc is concerned with you drinking three beers every day, the answer is yes, a bottle of Michelob Ultra is supposed to be considered equal to a bottle of Mickey’s or Grolsch.
IMHO, you’ve received a lot of bad advice in this thread so far concerning what a lot of alcohol consumption entails and whether or not your doc knows what he’s talking about. I wouldn’t give anything said here too much credence when it comes to your well being.
If you find non-alcoholic beer just as enjoyable as regular beer, you’re most likely better off drinking the non-alcoholic beer. They have similar calorie content and it’s not as if the calories you’re getting from alcohol are any better for you than the calories you’re getting from carbs.
I dunno. Seems to me as tho he received some amount of info and a variety of opinions, on an issue that IMO lacks a single definitive answer.
Everyone has to decide for themselves whether or not they are satisfied with their alcohol consumption.
A couple of thoughts:
First off, if I have any activity that I suspect might possibly be interpreted negatively, I’m gonna be careful how I disclose it to whom. Certainly not gonna be entirely open on an initial visit for a well-patient exam with a doctor I don’t know. I would have said something like “Most nights I’ll have a beer or 2 after work, but never more than 3 and never to point of drunkenness.”
I also agree with what others have said that the “habitual” aspect of the OP’s drinking (as well as the pace) are factors that tend to nudge him into the category of “heavy drinker” IMO. During my heavier drinking days, more often than not I would put down 4 beers on a 40 minute train commute home. Afterwards I might or might not drink more. I had no problem characterizing my train beers as “heavy drinking.” Whether or not it is “problem drinking” is another matter.
And it might be relevant why you drink your 3 beers a day. Sounds almost like a ritual. Especially pounding them in 30 minutes.
3 beers a day equals nearly a case a week. To a drinker, that might not seem like too much. But I’m pretty confident that the vast majority of Americans drink nowhere near that amount week in and week out. So by denoting you a “heavy drinker”, in my mind it accurately reflects that you drink more heavily than most people.
I also agree that someone who drinks 3 beers a day might want to think about what effect that has on your liver and brain over the course of years. Especially if you are taking any medications. As I passed 30 and 40, that kinda long-term question seemed more important to me.
In your opinion, does it make any difference how you view an individual’s drinking if they drink 3 beers every day, or 7 beers every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday? I don’t know that one is any better or worse than the other. But I’m not particularly troubled by describing both as heavy or habitual drinking.
In short, I think the term “heavy drinking” is somewhat useful in describing the OP’s drinking habits - putting it in perspective compared to the Alerican public.
I’m not trying to be judgmental - just expressing my perspective.
Full disclosure - I drank way more than 21 beers a week for many years, and have been sober for 3 years.
True.
It does seem foolish to choose alcohol over carbohydrates, but until recently I thought the alcoholic content of Michelob Ultra to be so low and harmless as to make it a good trade-off.
Michelob Ultra has 95 calories and 2.6 grams carbohydrates at 4.2% ABV.
O’Douls’s has 65 calories, 13.3 grams carbohydrates at 0.5% ABV.
My understanding is that it’s the carbos that produce the “beer belly”, which I don’t have and don’t want, and O’Doul’s has the same carb content as a regular, non-light beer.
Maybe I need to shop around more. Somewhere there has to be a low-carb, low-alcohol beer that tastes good.
Thanks for clearing up a lingering misconception I’ve had in mind for some time. I was under the mistaken impression that ethanol is not ethanol, but rather, methanol or some sort of fluoridated hydrocarbon.
Knowing what the real truth of the matter when it comes to diet advice is very difficult for us laymen, with all the conflicting information given in various diet books and by various “experts”.
I do believe that the current wisdom regarding where fat is stored in regards to which type of calorie you’re consuming is that it doesn’t matter.
Here is a quote from the Tuft’s Health and Nutrition Letter regarding claims made in the South Beach Diet book:
http://healthletter.tufts.edu/issues/2004-05/southbeach.html