How to Figure Out if Moderate Drinking Is Too Risky for You
Department of Health and Human Services, the 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans provide recommendations on what the average American should eat and drink to promote health and help prevent chronic disease. According to the guidelines, adults of legal drinking age can choose not to drink or to drink in moderation by limiting intake to two drinks or less in a day for men and one drink or less in a day for women when alcohol is consumed. There are some adults who should not drink alcohol, such as women who are pregnant. Adults who choose to drink, and are not among the individuals listed below who should not drink, are encouraged to limit daily intakes to align with the Dietary Guidelines.
Alcohol Use
Find a health center near you and ask about alcohol misuse screening and counseling. The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution. This shows the expenditure on alcohol in the United States, differentiated by where the alcohol has been purchased and consumed. At the end of this topic page, you will find additional resources and guidance if you, or someone you know, needs support in dealing with alcohol dependency.
Alcohol & Public Health
- Here, over 200 million people in the Region are at risk of developing alcohol-attributable cancer.
- Whilst the World Health Organization (WHO) and most national guidelines typically quantify one unit of alcohol as equal to 10 grams of pure alcohol, the metric used as a ‘standard measure’ can vary across countries.
- The debate still simmers today, with a lively back-and-forth over whether alcohol is good for you or bad for you.
- In recent years, the alcoholic beverage market has become even more diversified.
“So, when we talk about possible so-called safer levels of alcohol consumption or about its protective effects, we are ignoring the bigger picture of alcohol harm in our Region and the world. Although it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries. However, a prospective study following almost 15,000 men at four-year periods found only an increased risk of minor weight gain with higher intakes of alcohol. 19 Compared to those who did not change their alcohol intake, those who increased their intake by 2 or more drinks a day gained a little more than a half-pound. It was noted that calorie intake (not from alcohol) tended to increase along with alcohol intake.
About Moderate Alcohol Use
- Grain alcohol, which is virtually pure ethanol, is often bottled at a concentration of 94 percent alcohol by volume.
- In fact, in nutritional epidemiology studies that investigated the consumption of various food categories, reported alcohol intake was particularly reproducible compared with the reported intake of other nutrients (Longnecker et al. 1993).
- However, light wines may have an alcohol content in the neighborhood of 7 percent, whereas fortified wines (which include added distilled spirits) may range up to 24 percent alcohol by volume or higher.
- If you currently drink no alcohol at all, do not start because of the health benefits.
Since 1965 researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley, California, have conducted, at approximately 5-year intervals, nine national surveys as well as numerous community studies. The researchers have invested much effort in maintaining some degree of comparability across surveys, despite changing definitions and conceptualizations of alcohol-use disorders (Grant 1994). Traditionally, chronic disease epidemiology has focused on such medical maladies as heart disease and cancer.
What are the U.S. Guidelines for Drinking?
- Data on various chronic illnesses, as opposed to mental disorders, have been gathered since the turn of the century.
- Heavy drinking also has been linked to intentional injuries, such as suicide, as well as accidental injury and death.
- Globally, the age-standardized death rate has declined from approximately 40 deaths per 100,000 people in the early 1990s to 30 deaths per 100,000 in 2019.
- Disadvantaged and vulnerable populations have higher rates of alcohol-related death and hospitalization, as harms from a given amount and pattern of drinking are higher for poorer drinkers and their families than for richer drinkers in any given society.
Loose use of the terms “moderate” and “a drink” has fueled some of the ongoing debate about alcohol’s impact on health. According to the Office of Alcohol and Drug Education at the University of Notre Dame, IN, a woman’s body absorbs 30 percent more alcohol than a man’s after drinking the same amount. Excessive alcohol use can harm people who drink and those around them.
Alcohol consumption in the United States since 1850
For example, imagine two people who consume identical average volumes of alcohol (e.g., 14 drinks per week). One person consumes 2 drinks each evening, whereas the other person ingests all 14 drinks within a few hours on a Saturday night. That difference in drinking pattern has considerable implications for the drinkers with respect to the likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes, such as alcohol poisoning or alcohol-related traffic crashes. Unfortunately, little consensus exists among scientists as to what constitutes hazardous drinking and how one can best measure drinking patterns in general and hazardous drinking patterns in particular. Researchers have developed several definitions of hazardous drinking, such as consumption of five or more drinks on one drinking occasion or being intoxicated more than a certain number of times in a given time period. Few studies, however, have compared the ability of those various definitions to predict alcohol-related outcomes or their usefulness in shaping public health policy.
Consequently, when reading an article that relates a certain number of drinks per day to a specific health benefit or risk, one must pay careful attention to how a drink is defined in that study. The wide methodological diversity helps to explain, at least in part, the seemingly contradictory study findings regarding the consequences of certain drinking levels. Miller and colleagues (1991) have extended Turner’s analyses by providing simple calculation rules for converting alcohol-consumption data among four standard drinking units currently used by researchers. The authors urge the adoption of a common method for reporting alcohol consumption. It has also been suggested that individuals who frequently drink moderate amounts of alcohol may enjoy a moderate lifestyle in which exercise and food intake are modulated over the long term to accommodate https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/effects-of-alcohol-on-the-body-is-drinking-alcohol-bad/ for alcohol intake 15.
Finally, the Dietary Guidelines provide specific recommendations for recovering alcoholics and for people who have family members with alcohol problems. Changes over the past 25 years in the definitions of many psychiatric moderate drinking disorders have resulted in the continual need to develop new instruments to assess evolving criteria. Likewise, criteria in the ninth revision of the International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization WHO 1977) were modified substantially in the 10th revision (WHO 1992). The psychosocial epidemiology perspective holds that distinct psychiatric disorders, including alcohol-use disorders, are merely different manifestations of common etiological factors, particularly social stress. Psychosocial epidemiologists commonly rely on the psychometric tradition of psychology, wherein researchers depend on self-reports from subjects who answer multiple-choice questionnaires (Grant 1994).