Do you live a perfectly healthy lifestyle? do you drive, if so how does your car polluting the air have a dollar/cent (pound and penny here) effect? Ill probably die younger than you anyway so surely that will save money whilst you arent wiping my sorry butt. You seem to have issues with alcohol, I dont have issues with your sobriety, live and let live. As an ealrier poster said lif is aboutt quality not quantity, no decent story started with ‘we had some water’
There seems to me to be a massive unstated assumption here that a person’s productivity and life-years are not their own to throw away.
Perfectly healthy? No one knows what perfect is. But I am far closer to it than the vast majority of people. Lots of vegetable, fruits, high fiber foods, beans, nuts, moderate amount of meat, never processed (and I prefer bison which I can actually easily find in both my local chain grocery store and Costco), moderate amount of fatty fish. Very little soda and very little added sugar foods. Cook with high MUFA oils. My 3 to 5 drinks a week is in the zone most associated with good health outcomes. I exercise almost every day and mix it up with weights and cardio of various sorts. My car is a plug-in hybrid and usually runs gas free. My biggest health risk is how often I ride my bike to work … while I wear a helmet and am well illuminated drivers sometimes be nuts. Resting heart rate in the 40s. Decent social networks, married and love my work and well enough compensated for it. Blood pressure fine but genes over habits … I need a touch of Lipitor to keep my lipids in place. Despite genes glucose is perfect. Never smoker. Not overweight or obese nor underweight. Not depressed and sleep enough albeit probably should sleep a wee bit more. I actually practice what I preach. And enjoy my food, enjoy my moderate drink, enjoy my exercise playtime, and enjoy knowing I am fit.
Yes odds are (but odds are no sure thing for any individual, I could still get melanoma tomorrow, you never know) you will die younger than me but again the odds are my U.K. equivalent will be paying for your health and likely custodial care for years before you do, even though we are older than you now. By the odds I will have a very short period of time between significant physical/cognitive decline and death (“compression of morbidity”), whereas you will spend multiple years decrepit. Yup, quality not quantity matters more.
And sorry to be so blunt, but if having a “good story” requires that you get shit faced first then I feel very sorry for the quality of your life now. That is pathetic.
Eight pints a day? As a medical student I was always told once someone says more than 3 you should double anything they tell you, but let’s assume you are completely accurate. That’s likely more than 2000 calories a day in beer alone. Hard to imagine that you are not also obese and in particular with the central (so called “beer belly”) sort that is most associated with crappy health outcomes. And at the same time unlikely that you are eating any sort of adequate quality nutrition in the remaining calories you eat.
People like you are why are went into peds and not adult medicine. I have no empathy for people who don’t give a shit about their own health or about the impact their choices have on others who love them or society as a whole and adult side is full of such … people.
Prichester the explicit statement (no unspoken assumption here) is that those who drink to excess are going to suck off the teat of those who have not thrown their health and function away. No one is stopping them from doing that, they have the right, but the rest of us should be straightforward that such behaviors are not impacting the heavy drinker alone and not allow those delusions to go uncorrected.
When you talk about life lost you seem to imply this is bad without qualification by reference to imposition on others
Why yes, I do consider needless loss of quality years of life to be a bad thing, even without any imposition upon others.
And I believe society has a vested interest in preventing needless loss of quality life years, even in investing to avoid such loss. And it is still within an individual’s rights to throw them away, IMHO.
I have a good, happy life. I can afford to drink thanks to the hard work I put in, while sober, at a business I started and built up. I am cool with the idea of one day running out of liver and calling it a day.
You on the other hand come off strident and unhappy, or at least that’s the vibe I’m feeling.
Just an observation. Keep away from me pint and we’ll get along fine, though.
Well, for one thing, in a lot of US work places if someone comes in hungover and doesn’t work as productively as they should, or goes home early, or just calls in sick/hungover then everyone else has to pick up the slack. A lot of people get angry about that, especially if they already feel stressed and overworked.
Also, as noted, the US is a car culture and mass transit is largely non-existent. If a bunch of people go out to the pub either one has to abstain (or nearly so) or someone will be driving home impaired. That can have consequences for others if there’s an accident.
Now, if you can get smashed but do it so you aren’t coming into work on Monday hung over no one really gives a damn. Hence, partying on Friday and Saturday and going to church and sobering up on Sunday so you can haul your butt into work on Monday. Drunk driving used to be tolerated but that’s no longer the case, people get cranky if you’re doing something that potentially put them or their loved ones at risk of maiming or death.
I work for a company with tens of thousands of employees. Their official policy is that they really don’t care what you do on your days off as long as you come in to work able to function and be safe. That’s the attitude most people I know have.
You’re welcome to the opinion, but like so many, you have to draw a line between personal choice and societal control of same. And accept that drinking past some arbitrary minimum - which many people set at zero - is *not *automatically “a problem” or “alcoholism” (with or without any adjectival modifier). Millions drink “a lot” and have absolutely no alcoholism-spectrum problem, not even hangovers.
My overall objection is that drinking is demonized in an unfair and peculiar way - by, IMVHO, the pervasiveness of “AA think,” a very narrow and slanted viewpoint. There are a bunch of “everybody knows” that simply aren’t true, not for everyone and in some cases not even for any majority. The absolutism of AA’s approach is probably more harmful in the balance than it is beneficial to that minority who truly cannot tolerate (handle) the smallest intake. I’d be inclined to ‘live and let live’ if the notions of AA were not so universally accepted as The Answer and The Truth.
(They’re not? List every single instance of a film or television drinking problem that is not judged in AA terms, and does not descend to some form of AA solution. The only exceptions are where a character is “sent to rehab” - which is just the hardcore prelude to living AA-style.)
So I maintain that the answer to the OP’s question is basically “The pervasiveness of AA-influenced thinking and attitudes about drinking in the US” - and that other countries have more modern, open-minded and science-based attitudes.
I think the rest of the US posters are kind of giving you the extreme viewpoints, not an accurate picture of what US drinking culture looks like.
In general, most people in the US do drink, by and large. However, it’s not as pervasive of an activity as it is in the UK. The local bar isn’t generally the focus of local social life, outside of people maybe 21-31.
I’d say that heavy drinking (i.e. drinking with the intent of getting drunk) and/or drinking at bars and clubs is typically something that people in their 20s and early 30s commonly do. Most young person social activities have a fairly heavy alcoholic component, unless they’re part of some religious bunch that frowns on it like the Baptists.
After people hit their early 30s and start getting married and having children, that tapers off somewhat, and people go more toward a drink (glass of wine, beer, etc…) after the kids are in bed, or a few beers while at a holiday barbecue sort of drinking pattern.
Another thing is that at least based on my experience, people in the UK go after being drunk with a lot more vigor than they do in the US; I was shocked to see people puking their guts up every night, men just peeing wherever they could find a wall, people beating the shit out of each other, women just smashed, and stumbling around and falling down with their skirts pulled up, etc… I don’t even recall seeing quite that level of drunkenness in college- maybe the puking part, but the rest would get you thrown in jail or at the least a ticket if you were doing it in public.
However, there’s also a better attitude toward casual drinking than in the US; it wasn’t a big deal to have a pint with lunch, or anything like that. A lot of people having a beer at midday tend to get funny looks from other restaurant patrons, even though it’s ultimately none of their business.
That sort of leads me into the final point, and that’s that there is a very vocal and surprisingly large anti-drinking population in the US. In my experience, it seems to be an mostly overlapping mix of two populations- the religious anti-drinking crowd and the neo-prohibitionist crowd. The religious crowd overwhelmingly tends to be of the more fundamentalist Christian stripe- in the South, anyway, the Baptist churches are the most outspoken about this. They proscribe drinking for their congregations, and seem to do their dead-level best to stop anyone else as well. The neo-prohibitionist crowd seem to have a bigger issue with the effects of drinking rather than a religious dislike of the practice. They’re the ones you see in MADD and similar groups. They’re the ones who you’ll usually get snide commentary about “I don’t need to drink to feel good.” or something equally asinine from.
Anyway, that anti-drinking crowd is basically who got Prohibition passed in 1919, and while they were ultimately defeated, they’re still around and dug their claws into the culture enough to have made some fundamental changes in terms of attitudes and laws.
To take what Amateur Barbarian is saying a little further, they’re the ones responsible for the idea that drinking more than one drink with a meal is a sure sign of creeping alcoholism. Nowhere else in the world, save maybe Muslim countries have such a narrow view of things- plenty offer up lots of opprobrium for being drunk, but few do the same for moderate social drinking. Italy is a good example of this, but by the anti-drinking crowd’s standards, they’re horrible drunks.
AA’s propaganda does indeed permeate pretty much every part of American society. It’s quite disgusting the influence that cult has, their influence is immense in the legal system and they have a stranglehold on the ‘rehab’ industry as well.
Groups like MADD are basically prohibition groups disguising themselves as public interest groups. But, since cash strapped governments love DUI revenues, MADD can squeeze the USA back to prohibition, drop by drop.
Not likely, but the Calvinist/temperance/Demon Rum/Prohibition mindset just seems to linger on and on. (Maybe if we moved on to a science-, medicine- and data-driven model of alcohol abuse treatment we could get past that… that, and get screenwriters to quit being so effing lazy with their tropes.)
But MADD is interesting. When I worked with them in the early days, the second-in-command (Candy Lightner’s lieutenant) actually circled back to the office, parked and came upstairs to tell me (in a meeting he’d left) that they were NOT a temperance organization and had no focus on limiting drinking - just drinking and driving.
I know they’ve strayed into anti-drinking in more recent decades. Too bad. They are, or were, one of the most positive cultural/social influences of the postwar years.
How do some of the drinking cultures avoid physical alcohol dependence?
When you’re drinking hard liquor daily, or bottles of wine or multiple pints of beer how do you avoid being dependent for sleep etc?
Not everyone is prone to dependence, or addiction. As the recent CDC report put only 10% of heavy drinkers on the alcoholism spectrum, I’d suspect more people are more resistant to dependence than most “authorities” would allow.
In addition, there is, in the words of an old colleague, a “better way to drink” - and it involves being sensible about your drinking habits in ways that only partially overlap with US-brand “common sense.” It’s like any other dietary extra: indulge, but always remain aware and in control of your consumption.
I had a cardiac catheterization and stent exactly a year ago. I stopped drinking for ~2 weeks. Gave up weed also. I missed it but suffered no untoward effects.
My husband is the exact same–drinks a good amount every night, but when necessary he can knock it off cold turkey with no withdrawal at all. He’s a fun drunk and is in good shape, so it’s all cool with me.
Excuse my guffawing but I can state with absolute confidence that when you have a health consequence from excessive alcohol consumption you will not be just cool with calling it a day. If you are throwing up blood from esophageal varices you will want to be transfused, if you get full out cirrhosis of the liver (as 10 to 20% of heavy drinkers do) and feel like shit you will not refuse the medications aimed at managing the complications and as it progresses into complete liver failure you will be asking for a transplant.
Oh bump some actual numbers of what is “typical” in the U.S.:
A majority are below the 1 to 6 drinks per week that is associated with the best health outcomes.
The 80 to 89.9%ile is drinking a not absurd just over 15 drinks a week on average. The heavy drinkers though, the top 10% though, they are way out there, drinking on average over 73 drinks a week.
So in reality the vast majority of Americans drink moderately to not at all, and a few drink very very heavy. Those who drink much more than 2 drinks a day are a small minority but those who drink more than 2 drinks a day don’t usually stop at 2 … or 4 … or 8 … that decile is clearly in the range of major risks of major medical problems. Addicted? Dependent? Alcoholic? Enjoying themselves? Having good stories? Don’t know don’t care. But they are not normative and they are going to cost the rest of us.
My several drinks a week puts me solidly in the top third of alcohol consumption in America, FWIW
Thailand is basically a nation of lushes, which explains why a lot of partiers like to come here. There was a recent report pegging Thailand as tops for alcohol consumption among the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). And this link shows Thailand is sixth in the world for “annual spirits-drinking for adults per capita.”
As a general rule, I won’t drink with a Thai. They just won’t stop and pretty much have to be physically restrained before they let you stop.
Almost everyone is going to cost the rest of us. My great aunt rarely drank, never smoked, drove the speed limit, etc. She is now 97 and has been living in a nursing home for 30 years. If she’d died of lung cancer or cirrhosis in her 60s, the gov’t would have made out like a bandit rather than paying her medicare, social security, etc for another 30-40 years. Old people cost the system a lot.
I’d like to see a cost comparison. My hunch is that those who keel over at a relatively young age are a bargain compared to those who live to be 100+.
Read the thread. That discussion has been had.
Some people are fine with their spouses eating themselves into diabetes and heart disease and early death. Some with their spouses smoking. You are fine with your husband dramatically increasing his chances of liver failure and dementia and cancer and heart disease by drinking “a good amount” every night so long as he is a fun drunk and is in good shape and is not addicted.
Fine by me.
You don’t know me. I’m 57 and have had a good life. With my cardiac cath last year, I consented to a stent, but I decided preop to not go ahead with anything more invasive. No thoracotomy/bypass shit. I’ve got a stash of barbiturates for a worse case scenario. Realistically, with my genes, a MI is probably more likely.
Again, you do not know me. Not even close.