Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Median alcohol intake was 13.5 units ( 102g) weekly

That was among people who drank at all; for reference, that's just under two standard drinks per day, which is apparently what the UK considers the threshold of "low risk".

View on HN

There is a very large population of non-drinkers. Some surveys say that upwards of 50% of North America has less than a handful of drinks a year (ie only holidays/weddings and such). While that doesn't qualify as total abstinence, from a medical/safety perspective such people are dry. What has happened in recent decades is that those who do drink regularly tend to drink more.

https://www.alcohol.org/guides/volume-of-non-drinkers-by-us-...

> Glasses were converted to UK units as follows: red or white wine = 1.7 units; fortified wine=1.2 units; pint = 2.4 units; spirits = 1 unit; other (e.g. alcopops) = 1.2 units. Amounts were also converted to grams pure ethanol (1 UK unit=8g) to aid international comprehension and comparison.

Can someone explain these numbers to me? They claim to measure one “standard drink” (all of which are equal), yet each variant is a different number of units? Furthermore, wine is more (stronger?) than spirits? I must be missing something.

They are multiplying the size of a wine glass by the ABV of red wine, the size of a shot glass by the ABV of vodka, the size of a pint glass by the ABV of beer... it's all estimation, but it's what they've got.

But you just defined what a "standard drink" is, no? All of those values are supposed to be equal:

5oz of wine * 12% = 1.5oz of spirits * 40% = 12oz of beer * 5%

so I'm still confused...

Edit: Wait, do you mean the size of a full glass? That's... an odd way to measure things.

You go to a pub and order a pint of lager. In the UK, that's 568mL, and you think of it as one drink -- even though it's clearly not.

You go to the same pub and order a shot of whiskey, and it's about 1.5oz, so it's the same as you think it is.

Two drinks a day, every day of the week is a lot of alcohol.

It is. 14 is well above the median number of drinks for the US population.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/how-much-alcohol-do-ame...

One of the rare articles that discusses median consumption rather than mean average.

"The more I thought about these data, the stranger they seemed. My 11-drink-per-week habit corresponds almost exactly to the national average, 556 drinks per year. But according to this chart, that number would be grossly misleading, since it combines the huge number of people who never quaff at all with the much smaller group who drink like it’s their job. (Those in the top decile of consumption swig an incomprehensible average of 74 drinks per week.) When I compare my habit to the median instead of the mean, I find that I’m dosing myself with 10 times more alcohol than the typical American."

I make 102g of alcohol about 1 bottle of 14% abv wine (so, strong-ish, but not exceptionally so) per week, or about 3 cans of 10% stout. Unless my math's wrong (1ml ~= 1g [not quite since it's not pure water, but close enough], 750ml * 0.14 = 105ml ~= 105g)

For those playing along at home, regulator "drinks" always seem to convert to 0.25-0.75 actual drinks a normal person might call "one drink". I'm not sure why they do that, unless it's to confuse people on purpose so they drink more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com