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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live.

I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each other because it gets tiresome to have friends who want every event to revolve around alcohol.

Statistically, the median drinker in the US doesn't drink much alcohol at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by the top 10% of drinkers. You may have simply ended up with a cluster of heavy drinkers that aren't representative of the median US alcohol consumer.

Statistic here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think... Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than 1 drink per week.

View on HN

>It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture.

The US had a very particular set of economic conditions in respect of infrastructure quality, volume of arable land for corn production, and corn vs corn mash distillate transport costs.

The result? "[In the 1790s], the settlement of the so-called “corn belt” in the Midwest created large new supplies of corn, which was cheaper and more profitable to convert into whiskey than it was to transport great distances without spoiling. Thus, as Rorabaugh notes: “Western farmers could make no profit shipping corn overland to eastern markets, so they distilled corn into ‘liquid assets.’ By the 1820s, whiskey sold for twenty-five cents a gallon, making it cheaper than beer, wine, coffee, tea, or milk.”

https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol-history/the-1800...

Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze. While not uniform, the US has a consistently different relationship with alcohol than most other countries as a result of the impact of these events and responses to them upon it's food culture.

This is a very interesting point, however it does stand in contradiction to GP's claim that Europeans broadly drink more than Americans in absolute terms.

> Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze.

I once skimmed Prohibition-era academic text that described US drinking culture of the pre-Prohibition period in detail. It was fairly disturbing, as you suggest—whiskey in serving sizes that would work better with beer, and things like that.

But even though Prohibition failed to stop people from drinking, it apparently _did_ disrupt the earlier drinking culture in many ways. So I would be careful about using pre-Prohibition behavior to make inferences about post-Prohibition behavior.

(I'd love to find that book again, but sadly the library which had it got rid of a substantial number of rarely-used older books at some point.)

My statement isn't that Americans are still drowning in cheaper than milk corn-booze.

It's that there's a shared history regarding alcohol consumption which is uniquely American in nature.

Prohibition is part of that unique experience, and very much a part of the explanation for the compression of the consumption distribution.

A slight tangent but Hogarth's "Beer Street and Gin Lane" (1751) documents a similar example of low grain prices resulting in massive, country-wide alcohol consumption in England. The subsequent government reaction and legislation did not go as far as American prohibition though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane

Great book to read about the history of American drinking is "Drink: A Social History of America" by Andrew Barr <https://www.amazon.com/Drink-History-America-Andrew-Barr/dp/...>. It covers the historical forces behind the current state of drinking, why the drinks are what they are, and more. Fascinating, and full of anecdotes. This is a parallel book to his "Drink: A Social History" which was about the British social history of alcohol. Also fascinating.

I visited a castle in Switzerland (Chateau de Chillon) and they had a presentation on medieval eating and drinking habits.

Apparently it was absolutely normal for everyone who could afford it to be drunk all of the time, from seamstresses to soldiers. I don't think our modern efficiency-conscious society can really understand what it was like back then.

Two key bits - how drunk and who could afford it.

Safe drinking water was a pain in the ass. So mild alcoholic drinks was the norm. That that'd give you a little buzz at best.

Very few people could have afforded to be truly shitfaced 24/7.

From what I understand, the "safe drinking water was a pain in the ass" thing is largely a myth. Some good information available in this r/AskHistorians Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_d...

I believe it varies from region to region. In my country natural springs are all around so fresh water is not a problem. But I remember reading medieval era memoirs how people get surprised traveling when others don't have as much access to springs.

The article says that the bad water theory is unlikely because it's easier and cheaper to boil water than to make alcoholic beverages.

> Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than 1 drink per week.

The article says something else:

>> the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.

You might get less than 1 / week by including non-drinkers, who are (according to the article) at least 30% of American adults. But they're 0% of American alcohol drinkers.

Europe is exactly the same though. Majority of the countries/people don’t drink fancy wines for dinner but binge drink to party and forget about their troubles. Upper middle class in a few wine producing countries does not create a continental monoculture.

Anyone from Northern/Eastern Europe or UK will be shocked by US drinking culture in the opposite direction. My experience of Germany was also certainly not “wine for dinner” type of behavior

As for the US it depends on the social group. Definitely lower socioeconomic classes have quite different approaches and in some places a beer with lunch and then more beer in the evening to cope with hard labour is not unusual. And countries differ quite a bit, e.g. UK's binge drinking culture is very unusual in the rest of Europe. The Scandinavians and anything close to russia are known for hard liquor. Etc etc

> binge drink to party and forget about their troubles

Party, yes. Forget their troubles? Not in the context I’ve seen it happen in.

Drinking was always a strictly enjoyable activity in itself, not something you did to forget your troubles.

Hard liquor consumption is dropping everywhere in Europe and wine and beer are going up, especially in Eastern Europe, famous for hard liquor binging.

Only Northern Europe with its dreary weather is the outlier, somewhat.

My point being that raw alcohol consumption is going down across Europe.

Beer consumption in Germany is falling year after year consistently. Wine is growing, especially during Covid-19 time.

source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/575106/beer-consumption-...

> My experience of Germany was also certainly not “wine for dinner” type of behavior

Do you really suggest they drink hard liquor with dinner itself?

I grew up in northern Italy and spent years in Vienna for study, and did also a fair amount of travel around in Europe, what you seem to suggest just does not rings true for me.

For dinner and lunch it's normally one or a combination of:

* water, with or without CO2

* juice from self-made or store bought syrups (think from local berries or things like elder)

* soft drinks

* beer

* wine

Beer and wine are really not common on workday-lunch (at least if you don't work construction, or have a business dinner), but fairly normal on weekends or holidays, at least in my experience.

And only after dinner, and not always, a single Grappa/Schnaps/Shot is consumed, and that normally only if either people are over, or one dines at a restaurant (especially if it's a more folksy place).

If I go out with my SO to dine it's almost always a combination of water and wine if it's in a restaurant, and soda or beer if it's more street-food like, but never ever did we, or any other people we saw, drank harder liquor to their meal...

I think the US is a land of "extreme" personalities so I would guess that across a broad range of metrics (alcohol consumption, wealth, number of text messages sent per month), the ratio of the Top 1% to the median is probably higher in the US than in most other countries that the US considers "peers" (i.e. Western Europe, Australia, and Canada).

Statistics as detailed as "alcohol consumption by percentile" are hard to come by, but the data doesn't point to armchair just-so psychology like this.

Using some proxies for level of extreme drinking: The US isn't in the top 15 for binge drinking and is below the OECD average[1], and is ranked 50th globally for alcohol deaths (with far fewer than all 3 of OP's mentioned countries). This is despite a healthcare system with more gaps _and_ much higher risks from drunk driving due to being sparse and more car-oriented.

[1] www.statista.com/chart/amp/5357/the-worlds-worst-countries-for-binge-drinking/

Many have gone California sober [0] - moving away from alcohol to cannabis and psychedlics as a way to be more healthy and sustainable

[0] https://www.addictionresource.net/blog/california-sober/

Cannabis is in no way healthier than alcohol. It's hard to quantify the damages done by one vs. the other; but there are very serious social and psychological downsides to regular cannabis use.

Pretty sure alcohol is way harder on your body than edibles or vaping cannabis. Alcoholism has a huge blast radius.

I feel like it's likely a larger proportion of weed-users have it affect their productivity and motivation to grow in life than the proportion of drinkers who become dangerous alcoholics or end up with cirrhosis. I don't have data to back this up though.

I've seen more lives around me hampered by marijuana than by alcohol, despite having a very large amount of heavy drinkers in my circles.

I agree and I've seen the same.

However as far as actual physical health (rather then mental or social) I believe cannabis to be far less detrimental.

It might demotivate a person but it doesn't flat out kill them.

Is it also possible that alcohol is the lubricant for a society with dysfunctional social and environmental principles? Perhaps what we sometimes describe as motivation or personal growth isn’t actually that valuable when directed at goals that destroy the planet and isolate us from other humans.

Don't have any facts to back the assumption up, but I'd agree that alcohol is harder on the body.

Apart from the effects on the brain, there is also the weight issue when drinking both beer and wine.

It's amazing to me how much difference just 6-7 kg less weight makes.

UK expert disagrees —- marijuana does less damage to the user, and much less to friends and family, than alcohol does: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210

That article is about the harm to society as a whole. Pulling a single line from the article to summarize:

> Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.

There are lots of ways to measure the harm of drugs. But pretty much all of them result in cannabis being among the least harmful.

Another way to measure is the therapuetic index. It's the ratio of the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. It's about 10 for ethanol and 30,000 for cannabis. Larger is safer.

This means drinking ~10 times as much as your usual amount of alcohol has a 50% chance of killing you. For cannabis you would need to consume ~30,000 times as much (which is probably not even physically possible).

> Another way to measure is the therapuetic index. It's the ratio of the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. It's about 10 for ethanol and 30,000 for cannabis. Larger is safer.

That’s a pretty pointless indicator. By that measure marijuana is better for you than water.

That is technically correct if you were to consume abnormal amounts of either substance.

I have read of people dying from consuming too much water.

I have not read that of cannabis.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16614865

No, harms to user are also higher and the paper attempts to separate use rates from harms. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Cannabis is absolutely healthier then alcohol by the sheer fact that it can not kill you.

I don’t know why you’ve been downvoted. Yes there might be other metrics to use but this is a valid one

It can kill you though. It raises blood pressure and in some people this causes heart attacks.

Interesting, I didn't know that. Though I'd argue that's not quite the same as alcohol and/or alcohol withdrawal are active causes of death while this seems more like a side-effect/contributor. At least from what I'm getting from the article[1] I read.

Still, good point I'll keep that in mind.

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/what-you-should-kno...

I've had the misfortune of several alcoholic roommates, and it's disturbing. They'll yell at you, threaten you, get emotional, violent, cry, the whole works, and then deny it all the next morning.

In contrast, every regular marijuana user I've known long enough to form a judgement about their habit is very inoffensive to the people around them. It doesn't seem to bleed out into their work and emotional lives as much.

The evidence doesn't support marijuana being more dangerous than alcohol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_harmfulness#/media/File:D... Alcohol is moderately more habit forming, and several orders of magnitude more dangerous.

Heavy marijuhana smokers can show some or all of that traits, too.

But in general if I would have to chooss between a heavy pot smoker and a heavy drinker as roommate, I probably would "prefer" the average marijuanna user

Citation please?

Expert opinion and evidence doesn’t agree with you. See David Nutts papers which quantify harms in various domains for different recreational drugs. Both harms to users and others are way higher for alcohol than cannabis.

This is the Lancet paper. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

You didn't even list any examples.

I'll say this for cannabis: it can slow my mind down a bit when I otherwise am thinking about the 500 things that are worrying me in my life, and it allows me to sit down and watch a movie when I sometimes find it very hard to get the focus to do so. Self-medicating? Sure. Will I overdose on it or suddenly act with appalling bravado, risk-taking and sometimes anger? No. It makes me want to eat junk food.

Alcohol, I believe, is much more dangerous (when used to get to the point of drunken-ness on a regular basis) for your body and behavior.

I don't like the appeal of "stoner" culture either, and I think that like any vice or substance, it can have a negative effect on abusers. Our experiences must be different.

Totally anecdotal, but from knowing heavy lifelong drinkers and heavy lifelong pot smokers, it seems to me that alcohol is worse for your body and marijuana is worse for your brain.

Neither are 'healthy' in any sense of the word.

My annectodical experience is, that lifelong heavy drinkers who drink the same as a heavy smoker, are long dead, before reaching the same brain damage as pot smokers.

Brain damage from pot is mostly reversible, though. Damage from alcohol less so.

In either case, Dosis sola facit venenum (only the dose makes the poison).

So a person who used to be a heavy drinker before, would be better off, with a occasional smoke. A heavy pot smoker, with the occasional beer. And the wors of both worlds, is to combine both in excess.

That’s a great (surprising) reference. Intellectually I know functional alcoholics exist but it’s still tough to come to grips with that many people drinking that much alcohol.

I’m curious what it looks by age, geography, and household income.

I'm in the top decile of that posted chart. Some weeks I'll be higher, some weeks I'll be lower. Usually lower, but always above the ninth. Posting on a throwaway for what should be pretty obvious reasons.

In the past week I've had about three bottles of gin in various cocktails, assorted craft beers of the IPA or imperial stout variety, a couple of whiskeys, and an aperitif most days. I've been drinking mostly while sitting in front of my TV with my iPad out, doing some light programming, working on photo editing, or playing games. Normally I'd spend more time at bars with friends, but it's not exactly a great time for that.

I don't drink before or during work hours, but most hours after work I've either got a drink or I'm making one.

I'm 30ish, I make decent money doing devops, and I like to think the quality of my work exceeds that of most of my peers -- I've certainly gotten feedback saying as much from line managers.

I don't want to be too specific about anything, but I am happy to answer questions, if anyone has any.

I appreciate the response. Mostly I hate throwaways but this is an appropriate use.

As I’ve gotten older (I’m 40ish) hangovers have gotten worse and worse. It’s now to the point if I have 4-5 medium beers on Friday night I can write off Saturday. Has your subjective experience of hangovers gotten easier over time?

I've have never had much in the way of hangovers in my life, with the exception of the few times that I have gotten nearly blackout drunk and spent the next day curled up around a toilet bowl.

I tend to drink more on Friday and Saturday nights, and I will wake up the next morning feeling seedy and in need of a big greasy breakfast.

Weekday mornings, if I have had more than usual (by my own standards) to drink the previous night, I will wake up feeling like I slept poorly, but no more than that. It'll take me an hour to get up to speed, and then I'm likely to go to bed earlier than usual that night.

None of this has changed noticeably over the past decade.

It may or may not make a difference that I am meticulous about getting 8.5 hours in bed each night, I don't know, and it may make a difference that I've always had a fairly high tolerance for alcohol's effects.

In my 20s-30s, a few beers or cocktails before dinner. Then a few bottles of wine (with friend, co-workers). Then scotch, or the like. At late 40s, I could write off the next day.

Now, a cocktail (lockdown has turned my wife in to master bartender). Glass of wine with dinner. Maybe a whiskey after. All good.

Have friends over, turns into a bit to much and write off next morning.

If you drink 4-5 medium beers everyday, you'd need to drink at least 10 to induce a hangover.

hangover's get worse when you are older, or when you are older you drink less regularly so you get a worse hangover?

The "hangovers get worse when you are older" tripe is a miscorrelation. Any ageing alcoholic can attest to that.

The majority drink hardest when they're in their 20s, start slowing down in their 30s, and all but teetotal as they progress through their 40s. Hangovers are all just a product of your tolerance.

Not OP, but I drink quite a bit too. I discovered ZBiotics and it's made a very large difference in my experience with hangovers. I was also starting to feel worse hangovers as I aged (from being practically immune in my late teens / early twenties), but using ZB has taken me back to those levels. They're a YC startup, and the product is a GMO probiotic that produces the enzyme to break down acetaldehyde in your digestive system helping you cope with a much larger amount of alcohol than your body would naturally be able to do.

Important disclosure: I'm an investor in ZB. I use the product at least every other day and have done so for a few years.

If nothing else, it’s a clever idea. I put in an order and we’ll see how it goes.

Alternately there's NAC, which anecdotally I can say is a miracle if you're expecting to do a lot of drinking, and has some generally good reputation for this purpose and others (including, generically, as a nootropic).

It's a key ingredient in a lot of those commercial pre-drinking drinks. Cycteine itself is used as a combatant against Tylenol poisoning and it accelerates metabolism of acetaldehyde (at least in rats).

It seems like calories would add up pretty quick, especially when you throw beer into the mix. Do you have any trouble with weight? Or is that you eat a lot less food to compensate? I suppose to some extent a cocktail in hand on the couch substitutes for snacks.

All of the above.

I eat less than the average bear, I am overweight (although not absurdly so), and don't snack while drinking. I will occasionally go a week or two in which I only have one or two beers, total, and I have noticed that my appetite is significantly larger on latter half of those weeks.

Weight is one of the primary reasons I am considering drinking less, although there would have to be quite the associated and significant lifestyle change for it to stick.

You see the trap you're setting yourself up for, right? Getting back in shape is a lot harder to do then just keeping in shape and it doesn't get easy when you get older. I just don't think that one naturally drinks less when they get older, and things just balance out in the end. You may be in a world of hurt. I am a little jaded as I've seen family members die of alcoholism that no one - not even in their immediate family, were aware they had. Their decline was surprisingly swift and sudden. I'm not drink free, but it seems you drink more in one week than I do in a year. I couldn't imagine writing off even half a day (anymore) because I drank too much the night before. Life is not that long. Anyways, off my soap box.

Beer has typically less calories than Wine at least for light beers which are the most common.

https://www.livestrong.com/article/138115-beer-vs-wine-calor...

IMHO the real problem is that beer makes you want eat something.

That compares a can of beer to a .. at least large-side-of-medium (for home consumption, not charge-by-the-glass regulated sizes perhaps) glass of wine.

And even then the wine comes in pretty much in the middle of the beer range, you've just unilaterally decided that the less calorific beers are more common and drawn your conclusion on that basis..

Maybe that is true in the US, certainly causes a problem with ordering an IPA in the UK - I don't like the light fruity style of the American version, which is typically what you get from anything that would self-describe as 'craft', so it's a bit of a game of judging the branding for modern start-uppy craftiness vs.. imperialness (!) if not already familiar. (I digress..)

Not only they add up, alcoholic drinks tend to stimulate your appetite and often the only thing around is some ghastly fast food joint.

I was a rather hesitant drinker, having two to three glasses of wine a week. When I stopped drinking even that (on Apr 30), I lost several pounds over just five weeks. And they went off my midsection, the belt does not lie and neither does the mirror.

Even this relatively small amount of alcohol did something.

3 fifths of gin in a week would destroy me for that same week, I would be worthless.

I learned recently that the booze industry would go bankrupt overnight if it weren't for the heaviest drinkers, those who consume the best part of a fifth of whiskey every day. See e.g. https://www.newsweek.com/americas-heaviest-drinkers-consume-...

Makes you realize the hypocrisy of "drink responsibly".

Drink responsibly is just for legal purposes. Every company owner wants their end users to consume more of what they make.

> It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live.

This is also true of Europe. What the parent said about France/Croatia/Germany does not reflect the drinking culture in other places.

1 standard drink. Did you know that a US standard drink for beer is 12 ounces (a pint is 16) at 5% alcohol by volume? In the PNW Pints Are the standard size and definitely stronger than 5%.

Also the German standard drink size for beer is less than 12 fluid ounces. Similar differences exist for other beverage types.

These comparisons are not only difficult, but the survey takers vastly underreport their actual consumption (probably unknowingly).

I though the standard beer in Europe was always 500ml.

UK pint is 568ml, a US pint is less than 500ml (because their fl oz are different, and I think even a different number to a 'pint').

Rest of Europe (and Québec) uses 500ml or a litre metric in my experience, yes.

In the Netherlands the standard beer bottle is 330ml.

When going to a bar there are several types of glasses available for a beer from the tap ranging from 200ml to 570ml (English pint size). When you order a beer, by default you get a 250ml glass.

Nope.

In most restaurants and bars, 300ml is the standard size, sometimes even 250ml. 500ml is considered a big beer. 300ml is also the standard size at festivities, concerts and sports games.

In Colone, the standard size of the local beer (Kölsch) is 200ml, but 300ml is also common.

In the south of Germany, especially bavaria, 500ml is the standard size in restaurants, and 1L at festivities and in bars run by breweries. 500ml is also the standard size of wheat beers nearly everywhere.

In shops, you can get beers in bottles of 330ml and 500ml.

My idea originally comes from the fact that in eastern europe you have either a beer (500ml) or a "small beer" (330ml). Cans are 500ml and bottles vary. In france there is a pint (500ml) or a "half beer" (the usual size) which is 200-250ml. Cans are again 500ml but bottles are all over the place and mostly 330ml.

It depends a little, but in southern Germany (and parts of Austria) 500ml is absolutely the standard and small ones aren't even available in most restaurants (the more regional, the less likely).

I've never lived in the north, just visited very often, and there it could be different depending on the region, setting. Some also say they feel 500ml is the default, others are more in the 330ml range.

I also want to add that 1 standard drink is something defined by the government / health authorities. This isn't the typical drink Bavarians actually drink. It is used for calculation of blood alcohol level or for medical purposes.

Seems that most beers in Bavaria probably approximately equate to 2 standard drinks, meanwhile a small Pilsener commonly found in the North is about 1 standard drink.

Yes, I know (now). But we don't have this measurement of a "standard drink" at all. An Australian ex-coworker had to explain the term, much to my confusion. By "the standard" I simply meant what you will get if you go to a restaurant (or pub or bar) and order "one beer".

I don't think you can generalize this across Europe.

Cans and bottles have/had "preferred sizes" (hence 330mL, 250mL, 500mL being common), but there's no European standard for how much you get in a bar or restaurant.

In Iceland 500ml used to be the standard size of beers at bars maybe 10 years ago. Now 400ml is the most common size (although outside of Reykjavík 500ml is still common). 330ml is the most common size in restaurants and in the liqueur stores.

In the Northwest of Germany the default is either 200ml or 300ml (the latter being approximately the size of a typical bottle of beer). For Pilsener a big beer is 400ml. For Hefeweizen a big beer is usually 500ml.

In the Northwest you won't find beers larger than 500ml (< 1 pint)

Nice comment. I also want to emphasize that your point about regional variance is true in Europe as well, this without even mentioning several well known European drinker stereotypes.

It’s actually very easy to reduce the us to a simple monoculture, compared to other regions of similar size. Compared with the EU or India, us culture is very similar across regions. Same language, same food, same religions, same work culture…

While the US has basically every current religion there are huge regional differences in which religions are common. Mormons for example are still extremely concentrated in Utah. New Jersey has a much larger Jewish community than most of the US etc.

Where are you from, and where have you lived, visited, and worked to come to this conclusion?

It's not at all what I've experienced as a US born after living on both coasts, a few different states, and a range of small rural and large urban cities.

Food sure, if you only consider culture as the corporate branded chains. That's missing out on a lot though.

Language, accents, nomenclatures, sayings, mannerisms, all widely varied.

Religions, there are dozens of Christian based sects all with widely varying spectrums of beliefs.

Work culture, still many good-ole boys clubs in certain geographies, pick yourself up by the bootstraps types in others, and anything you can imagine in between.

The OP specifically said compared to regions of similar size. You only talk about variations in the US, have you lived outside? The variations that you talk about, you can find in Germany alone which is the size of a medium size US state.

The variations across Europe (I can't speak for India) are on a completely different level. If you put a random person into two different states in the US and two different countries in Europe for an hour and ask them after which differ more, I would bet serious money they will always pick the two European countries.

> Europe for an hour and ask them after which differ more, I would bet serious money they will always pick the two European countries.

Only because of superficial things like language. When it comes to politics and the role of government, Europe is pretty consistent. Barring language and architecture, this makes cities all effectively the same pattern (high density, trains, buses, expensive per sq foot).

The gulf between life in the sprawl of Dallas and the density of NYC is far greater than the difference between Paris and Rome.

OP also conflated regions and countries. I read it as they were comparing US, EU, and India as a whole. Also curious where their perspective came from.

My point is that the presence or absence of cultural variation in one place does not equate to a lack thereof in another. Just because someone hasn't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Culture isn't based on comparison, it's something in its own right

And yet one year later we learn that 18% of Americans are binge drinkers:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...

If approximately one in five people are doing it then either it needs to lose the stigma or the definition needs to change.

Stigma doesn’t exist simply based on how many people do something.

Honest question: Why?

Isn't that up to those who hold the stigma?

I'd have a stigma against dog walkers who left their dog crap at the park, even if I found it was most dog walkers. (I don't think it is)

I think the difference there is that even if most people left dog crap we might still have a consensus that that was a bad thing and that people shouldn’t do it.

It’s because the stigma is based on the “binge drinker” label and its implication of irresponsible levels of drinking, while the official definition of the label itself specifies a level of drinking that many would otherwise not deem an issue. eg. three restaurant-pour glasses of wine during a three course meal.

Would you say the same about cigarettes? Or about drunk driving?

I think that’s a silly way to respond to this. If someone were to say “America has an opioid problem”, would we really sit around and play this game of pretending like that statement is incorrect, just because it’s possible to identify groups where that is not the case? No.

Something can be a problem in America without being a problem in every single instance. The point is not every single American culture is full of drunks, the point is that this is a problem that America is having.

that chart does not make sense to me unless >10% of Americans are AA. I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk

Is it really that hard to imagine some people just don't have much of a desire to drink? I go pretty long stretches without drinking.

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them. Quoted by Israel Shenker, "Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens," The New York Times (1972-12-28)

Often quoted as "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him"; referring to George McGovern's loss to Richard Nixon in in the 1972 presidential election.

> I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk

Most people I associate with don’t drink anything on an average week.

It’s likely that you’re in a bit of a bubble if you can’t think of anyone who doesn’t drink in an average week.

Yeah, that's an odd statement to me. I don't not drink, but I also don't go out of my way to drink that often. Even considering the mean rather than median, I'm pretty sure that I fall short of 52 drinks/year.

I wouldn't necessarily assume that I'm in the majority, but it's not as though my behavior in this area is particularly abnormal.

I get how one could pretty easily fall into a group of people who drink on a weekly (or more frequent) basis.

That being said, of people I'm close to, my parents are a good counter-example. They split one beer every month or so.

Out of interest. What do people do at social occasions? What would you do if you met a friend after work on a Friday night? I think we need better options for this in the Uk... most cafes shut and not drinking in a pub still feels weird (and soft drinks are so sweet)

Pole here. I only drink when I go out with someone, or have a party. Mostly wine, once a couple years vodka. Occasionally, when I have company during lunch, we drink one glass of wine to it. Oftentimes though, when I invite someone over, we don't drink alcohol, I make lemonade or tea. Lemonade with matcha and ice cubes is a great replacement. Maybe more places should offer lemonade?

PS. It's not uncommon for me to drink 3 glasses of wine a year. Although recently I've been more social, so it's been 1-2 glasses of wine every 1-2 weeks. I don't go out of my way to drink alcohol, but I also don't avoid it.

I've never had much trouble getting alcohol-free drinks at pubs/bars in Canada. More hip places usually have alcohol-free options (alcohol-free beer/cocktails, kombucha, etc.), and less hip places will at least have some kind of bagged herbal tea if you're avoiding caffeine. Bars/pubs will pretty much always have coffee too, even if it's not especially good.

I do pretty demanding sport as a hobby. Even one drink during the week greatly impacts recovery and ability to perform and lessens my enjoyment considerably. It’s rather commons in my circles for people to probably average a handful of drinks per year at most.

If one drink/wk is noticeably affecting you then you're either a professional athlete who's got world class people monitoring their performance or you need to see a doctor.

Edit: Assuming the standard definition of drink that's roughly equivalent to one light beer or one shot

Why? I do a minimal amount of exercise and I can feel the difference if I had one drink the night before. Forget exercise, it’s obvious I had a drink the night before from how I feel as soon as I wake up, just from the degree to which alcohol negatively effects quality of sleep.

It’s not like I suddenly break down or something. There are a few factors in my sport. BJJ is mostly cardio so I sweat a lot. I train at or close to my limits most of the time. Recovery isn’t as easy at 41. Alcohol depletes just enough from my body and impedes recovery just enough that the next day, I won’t be 100%, and I’ll feel it. Even one drink in the evening is massively disruptive to sleep processes like REM sleep. It depletes key nutrients from muscles, etc. so maybe I’m just a little slower.

Then there is the cramping. Replenishing electrolytes when you leak as much of them as I do is hard. There is a really good chance I will get a moderate to severe cramp if I drank the night before. I think you are underestimating how significant a drink can be to someone training hard. Especially someone older, such as myself. You have to make a very large number of assumptions to arrive at your conclusion that is obviously incorrect for many athletes hobbyist or otherwise. Some guys can pull it off, and there are a few in my gym who can drink hard, come in hungover and survive a hard training session. That isn’t me or most people I know (anecdotally).

You might be overtraining. When I trained in BJJ and also tried to weight train as well as cardio I felt the difference between drinking or not. But that largely went away when I stopped trying to do so much. Other health markers improved as well (sleep, RHR, etc.)

Just a thought if you're noticing a single drink that much.

I have been doing it for a number of years now. My limit is what I can do while maintaining great deep sleep, etc. I can occasionally push harder, but then sleep and overtraining creeps in. So, I am staying somewhere comfortably under that overtraining threshold. Even minimal alcohol consumption starts really messing things up :)

OT: Training close to your limits all the time is counter productive. Read up on block periodization for how you get more from your training.

Good point. I don’t periodize my BJJ training, but when I am tired and sore I go light. I like an undulating periodization model for both cardio and strength work. Rest and knowing what the precursors to overtraining are like are huge. My “limit” training is what I can maintain year round. Base training as it were with smart full breaks here and there. I have read way too many books on strength training and running, used to run ultras and lift a lot before embracing martial arts. Undulating periodization basically works out to a few different training intensities and modalities that are cycled through carefully to promote stimulus and avoid overtraining. It’s similar to block periodization in concept to block periodization but the blocks are more flexible and at my age much shorter before I have hit the max benefit of a block and moved on to the next one. The cool thing about undulating periodization is you pick up where you left off in a block.

I feel hung over whether I drink one beer or six, it doesn't really change. I don't even feel any 'buzz' if I drink one beer, mixed drink or glass of wine, but will just feel bad for the next 12-hours.

I am 42, so close in age to the OP, and I, too, notice that recovery from workouts is easier when I have zero alcohol in a week then, well, not one, but three drinks a week. And better sleep might be the explanation.

That substance is not exactly harmless.

You get used to it (playing a sport hungover, even). If you’re not a competitive athlete on a high level (it’s just a hobby), you’re missing out by not drinking because of your sport. If you enjoy drinking, that is.

Plenty of people compete as a hobby. You might also say if they were drinking, they'd be missing out on performance. If they enjoy performing better, that is.

I have many friends (and family) most of whom are in no way an alcoholic in AA, that hardly ever (or never) drink. Some just don't enjoy the effects, some prefer not to for health reasons, some just honestly prefer to smoke a joint. The fact that you can't think of a single person like that is equally surprising to me.

Hi! Nice to meet you. There are weeks when I have 0 drinks per week, and then others where I have lots more. It all depends on mood and activities. Specifically if the smoker is running.

I'm with you brother. Life is too short.

My neighbors and I have been doing Friday night happy hours for almost a year, always outside. Many with a fire going and outside movies shown on the side of my RV. The 6 of us look forward to these.

Personally, I couldn't care less what others think of this or how "sustainable" this is.

Some might argue life is too short to drink. I personally arrived at that conclusion. To each his own.

Well for starters you've got all the Muslims and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sometimes know as Mormons. That's two big ole' swathes of people who probably don't drink at all.

Then you have pregnant women, and women who are trying to conceive, and sometimes their partners will also give up drinking in solidarity....

My wife asked me to stop drinking while she was pregnant, and I complied. I think it backfired though, because I drank more after she gave birth than I ever did before.

A lot of people don't like alcoholic beverages at all.

I have member of my family that despise the taste of alcohol.

Then, we have people like myself, and my father, whom self medicate.

(I hate the taste of all alcohol. I only drink it for the effect. To the problem drinkers out there, don't even think about going to hard alcohol. Stick to low alcohol beer, and wine. Box wine can have as little as 9% alcohol. Naltrexone seems to help with the cravings if you need to stop.)

Kratom is a great replacement for alcohol for such use. It has its abuse potential as well, but is zero calorie and hangover-free and doesn't damage your liver. Of course everybody responds differently, but it's been incredibly valuable to me for this need.

May be an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias

I drink but don't have one drink a week. The vast majority of weeks I have 0 drinks. Once in a great while I might have a couple of drinks (if I'm in the mood) but it's not a regular thing at all.

I'm not morally opposed to it and I'm certainly not an alcoholic, I just don't care much for or about it. It's kind of a low level toxin and it feels like it.

Is this really that strange? I know a lot of people that very rarely drink and certainly don't habitually, but will have a drink on occasion.

I'm not a non-drinker but I would say I have less than one drink in a typical 4 month period.

I am a drinker. I am very fond of beer, whiskey, and wine. I love the taste of all three. I have a well-stocked liquor cabinet and always have a few beers in the fridge and bottle or wine or two in the kitchen.

Even so, in the past few years, I typically consume less than one drink per week. I used to have a nightcap or a beer with dinner pretty frequently. The dinner beer tapered off because I found it made me too sleepy to be on the ball with the evening routine with the kids. The nightcaps started to feel like pointless calories.

So these days, I might have a beer or whiskey on the weekend when I watch a movie with my wife. But I rarely drink during the week, and often don't on the weekend.

Granted, part of that is from having no ability to socialize the past year. I imagine my consumption will tick up soon. But I still don't expect it to get to more than one or two drinks per week.

Older people drink significantly less than the young. By age 65, more than half Americans are teetotalers.

This is partly why alcohol epidemiology is so hard. People drink less in ways correlated with their general health.

By age 65, most heavy drinkers are dead.

I once used to visit my friend in a rehab (he pulled it off and now is sober). There were no people over 55 actually, though some 40-somethings looked seventy on the outside. "Oh, either you get sober or you die way, way earlier than the general population," said the nurse when I asked her where the old-timers are.

To fit the pattern, my grandpa, a functional alcoholic, died at 57. His brother, who was much more careful with his drink, lived to 87.

I wouldn't hazard a guess about the general population based on the people I know. I can, though, talk about my experience.

I grew up in what's called the "Bible Belt", so that may have something to do with my not drinking. I had what might be a common experience--as a child expressing curiosity about a beer a relative was drinking, being offered a sip, and spitting it out in disgust, with no interest in a second taste.

Much later, a friend invited me and other friends over to a very nice dinner with appropriate wine served with each course. It was good, and all seemed well... until I noticed that I was singing Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango" at high volume. The next day what freaked me out was that at every stage I thought myself under control, but clearly I had lost it. I did not want a repetition.

Since then I found that there is good tasting beer; I tried a little at a restaurant where they brewed it themselves--but I only tried it the once and didn't finish it. Later I heard that occasional red wine was supposedly good for one's health, and for a while ordered a glass periodically, but I couldn't make myself finish it. Haven't had any for a long time, and now the prescriptions I take preclude further drinking. (Maybe aging baby boomers on prescription drugs bend the curve?)

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