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Comment by 1shooner | Hacker News Reader

>It turns out that two drinks per day, which might be considered ‘moderate’ from a social standpoint, is associated with a substantially elevated risk of a premature death caused by alcohol, they explain.

Two drinks sounds moderate to me. Averaging two drinks a day does not.

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NIH would define this as "heavy alcohol use". According to their estimates, only 5.5% of adults did this in the past month:

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

(Search for "Prevalence of Past-Month Heavy Alcohol Use")

Some interesting stats in there. Like only 85% of adults have drank ever in their lifetime.

Alcohol education classes promote (or used to promote…I had to attend one a couple of decades ago in college), the 1-2-3 system.

Not more than 1 unit an hour, don’t average more than 2 units a day over a week, and never exceed 3 units a day.

The caveat here is that a unit is much less than a regular serving size. A pint of beer is usually closer to 2 units.

So the recommendation was to not average more than a pint of beer a day, and to never drink more than about 1.5 pints in a day.

It’s much more stringent than people imagine.

> It’s much more stringent than people imagine

Only from a perspective of "drinking any amount of alcohol daily is normal"

I realize that I'm a pretty extreme outlier in that I don't drink alcohol almost at all anymore.

Even when I did drink, drinking any amount daily would have been unfathomable to me. A couple of drinks on Friday and over the weekend was plenty. Maybe one drink after work on a weeknight if I went out with coworkers or something

I don't really get why people love it so much, honestly

I agree with everything you wrote except that last paragraph.

A pint of beer a day is a lot. It's almost 500 calories - a meal by itself.

EDIT: I multiplied wrong, it's more like 250 calories.

I don't see how that's "stringent".

Maybe there are different sized pints, but in the uk a pint of beer is about 200 calories.

Depends on your social circle of course, but it’s pretty standard to have two or three pints if you meet up with friends in a pub.

Nah I multiplied wrong. Edited my comment.

2 drinks a day is approaching Mad Men levels of alcohol consumption.

more like 2 drinks per meal in Mad Men

2 and 6 are the same order of magnitude.

They're within an order of magnitude of each other but they're not _in_ the same order of magnitude. 2 would be in the 0th order and 6 would be in the 1st.

But even if it weren't so, I'm not sure what your point is. Do you have a reason for thinking that orders of magnitude is a good way to compare alcohol consumption?

The typical glass of wine you'd be served at a dinner party is actually two "standard" drinks. So... no. Not at all. Not even close.

The article says 5oz (approximately 150ml) of wine is one standard drink. Unless you're being served nearly half a wine bottle (300ml of a standard 750ml bottle) in a single glass at a dinner party, you're wrong about that.

And if your dinner parties really are like that, cheers friend. Fun times.

haha I stand by my statement

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