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Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

There's only "14.7 million daily drinkers" in the US?

as someone who used to drink daily but stopped, I found that I dramatically overestimated how much the average USian drinks. when you're surrounded by drinkers it's an easy mistake to make.

Drinking is very unevenly distributed. Most people don't drink much, and many people don't drink at all.

I was surprised too, a quick search produced something a bit different.

"The top 10 percent of American drinkers - 24 million adults over age 18 - consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...

Perhaps a lot of them binge hard a couple days a week, dropping them out of the “daily drinker” category? Does seem weird.

I mean I’ve gone through parts of my life where I’d have close to 10-12 beers a day over the course of the entire day… womp womp

Long distance binge drinking

There are some issues with that claim: https://whatifpost.com/no-10-of-adults-dont-have-more-than-t...

Yeah it was surprising but this is from NIH, they didn't have a stat for daily drinkers so I took the most extreme.

According to the 2022 NSDUH, 16.0 million adults ages 18 and older reported heavy alcohol use in the past month (see glossary for definition of heavy alcohol use)

Heavy alcohol use (or heavy drinking):

NIAAA defines heavy alcohol use as follows: For men, consuming five or more drinks on any day or 15 or more per week For women, consuming four or more drinks on any day or 8 or more per week

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-to...

That definition makes the majority of Irish men (living in Ireland) heavy drinkers.

And Ireland has the highest life expectancy in the EU

And it's full of redheads (I've heard).

It's high, but not the highest.

I was using 2022 data so a little out of date.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2022/1222/1343395-health-report/

It’s all so close at the top it shuffles around regularly so it’s kinda moot.

I don’t think that’s physically sustainable for one week much less ongoing to be an average over the course of a year.

I’m pretty sure that would kill me and I’ve always had a relatively high tolerance.

You have no idea what real alcohol dependance can look like. 74/Week is a run of the mill alcoholic. Many drink double that for years and even decades before their liver forces them to stop or die.

Yea, that's what I thought, too. When OP posted that figure, I thought, that's like 10 beers a day... I mean, yes that's a lot, but even I might have achieved that during the peak of my irresponsible drinking era. When I think "actual alcoholic" I imagine about 3X that number.

The other issue here is the term tolerance. There's the "I have a high tolerance" sentiment from people who think that means they can drink a couple more drinks than their friends and not pass out verses real tolerance in the medical sense of the term. Tolerance in the medical sense is that you have submerged your central nervous system in a depressant for so long that it has effectively "Overclocked" itself to compensate. It now runs faster and hotter in order to overcome the constant presence of something trying to slow it down. That's why people with real tolerance sweat profusely, have uncontrollable shaking and potentially seizures and hallucinations when the CNS depressant is removed from their system. Their nervous system has adjusted to only function normally with the depressant in their system and functions extremely abnormally without it.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised it's that high.

yeah. a bit suspicious. that's < 5% of the US population. highly dubious.

For daily drinking? Why is that dubious - most people drink occasionally, not daily.

I think there's a lot of people that drink a glass of wine at dinner maybe? They're not by any means alcoholics but would be included in that 5%, which seems expected I guess.

It's possible that those who drink wine daily, both cluster together and reinforce each other.

Thus, it may seem like a significant proportion of the population from the perspective of someone who does, or hangs around at least 1 such person.

In Hungary, it seems maybe half the male population drinks daily.

Seems about right to me, if not high. Keep in mind that this isn't the number of Americans that consume alcohol, but the number of Americans that consume alcohol on a daily basis. People that drink on the weekends, or a few times a week after work, don't qualify. 1 in 20 seems a bit high to me, but within the ballpark.

This thread is fascinating for highlighting that what seems normal to one person seems rare to another.

I'm not sure I know a single "daily drinker". Even the people who had reputations as being heavy drinkers I don't think drank every day. Drinking daily sounds like something someone in recovery would talk about as the final stage of their spiral towards rock bottom before they went to rehab, not something I'd expect 1 in 20 people to be doing.

But maybe I'm underestimating how many people have one glass of wine with dinner or one beer after work.

Before becoming a techie I did construction work and nearly every person drank beer after (and often during) work. It was a way to alleviate the pain from hard manual labor.

Heavy manual labor jobs almost require two beers in the evening if you don’t have a bathtub to soak in.

I forget the exact statistic, but something like 10% of Americans drinks 90% of the alcohol.

I’m surprised it’s that high. Yikes.

There are about 260,836,730 adults over the age of 18 in the US as of 2022, so 14.7 million daily drinkers seems relatively low:

https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/6538-adult-populatio...

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