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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

> by definition, my alcohol consumption from my late teens to late 20s would be considered binge drinking.

“I’m a social drinker”

It also says that two large glasses of wine in one sitting is a binge for women.

Are you implying that's semantically surprising? My wife has to take even a single standard glass slowly. All smaller people I know do, unless they are intending to get at least tipsy, which is probably outside most definitions of "social drinking" (but not outside typical drinking behavior among friends, if you want to take the phrase "social drinking" as statistically literal).

How much is sex and how much is body weight and genetics? Swedish and Japanese livers process stuff quite differently, I expect some variation even among "Anglo".

Isn't getting tipsy the driving motivation behind social drinking? If it weren't, people would be drinking grape juice.

It's a cultural thing. Traditionally, in Mediterranean societies, "drinking socially" means you are sitting at a long table with your family having a big meal and drinking wine from a small glass.

Granted, today the families are smaller, the tables are shorter, the meals are faster, the wine glasses are larger, "social drinking" spills out to drinking with friends and colleagues, and getting at least pleasantly sloshed of a night out is increasingly common, as is bingeing and getting totally smashed with your friends. At which point, yeah, the purpose of "social drinking" is getting off your tits.

We are all slowly turning into Western Europeans I guess :/

The article defines “binge drinking” later on:

> In the UK, a binge is considered as drinking six or more units of alcohol in one sitting for women, and eight or more for men. That is two large glasses of wine for a woman.

That is not a socially outlandish amount of alcohol to consume.

"Binging" is also not socially outlandish. There's a lot of room between "social drinking" and "socially outlandish drinking".

4 pints? That's just "taking the edge off"

Man, which bars do you frequent where a large glass of wine is two pints?

Heh he probably meant alcohol content

It’s a little over half a bottle of 13.5% wine (according to one sample on my counter, the full bottle is 10.1 UK units).

So no, not outlandish.

(And oddly, Irish units are larger than UK units, even though we both use the same pints)

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