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Comment by alwaysrunning | Hacker News Reader

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...

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I was using 2022 data so a little out of date.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

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

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.

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