How much do you really drink?
Nope, it's more than that...
I was filling in the forms. You know the ones – standard medical questions about your lifestyle, general dimensions, medical history. I can’t remember if it was a health screening questionnaire, a life insurance application or a public survey, but I came to the killer question:
‘How many units of alcohol do you drink per week?’
In the UK, The National Health Service recommends that people drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week, spread over at least three days. The range of 10-14 limits per week used to be described (either officially or colloquially) as the safe range, but it’s now known as ‘low risk’, acknowledging that any amount of alcohol increases your risk of developing a whole range of health nasties, from high blood pressure to diabetes.
A unit is 10ml of pure alcohol. You can easily work out how much you’re drinking, as long as you know the volume and the alcohol percentage. A litre of 5% alcohol beer contains 5 units, so a 440ml can would be 2.2 units. If you’re drinking 14% alcohol wine, a 750ml bottle is 10.5 units (14 x 0.75).
You can also find a handy alcohol unit calculator here.
I thought I was well within that low risk range, so I ticked the ’10-14’ box. It wouldn’t mark me out as high risk but also sounded about right. There was no way I drank more than that, apart from at Christmas. And birthdays. Anyone’s birthday.
I’ve been keeping count of my alcohol units since 2019. Initially this was for no better reason than I wondered whether the ’10-14’ I’d been putting on forms all this time was anywhere near true. It felt true, but I had no data to back it up and was genuinely interested to find out. My aim wasn’t initially to restrict or reduce what I drank, just to understand how much.
It’s not particularly scientific - at the end of each week, I just write a number in a notebook, and add them up at the end of each month and year. But as I now approach the end of the sixth year of doing this, I have quite a good set of data from which I can draw some conclusions and make some decisions.
You don’t have to look particularly hard to find information about how bad alcohol is for your health. But everyone knows someone who bucks those trends – my own grandfather drank like a fish for much of his adult life and died, with a whole range of diseases, but primarily of old age, at 86. His wife, my grandmother, never drank, was a vegetarian, didn’t smoke, constantly helped others and died at 85.
Drinking significantly increases your risk of a wide variety of problems, from heart disease and liver damage to diabetes, cancer and strokes. But it’s also really nice – to paraphrase Trainspotting, we wouldn’t drink at all if it wasn’t. That’s why people get addicted to it, and how it ends up ruining lives and families. But this is not an article about addiction – like many people of my generation I have drunk fairly heavily at various points in my life, but that changed with my lifestyle and age and at this point I only drink lightly.
December is the month where you’re most likely to drink more than you should, and certainly that’s what my drink-tracking has shown to be the case for me. I have generally had three times as much during December as in a normal month. I drink more on holiday than when I’m at home. Neither of these facts are particularly surprising.
After the first year of keeping track I found I was in fact averaging 9 units a week, with the actual weekly amount fluctuating fairly wildly between 0 (most of January) and 31 (Christmas). I was both pleased and disappointed by this – I was well under the low risk limit, but it still seemed like an awful lot over the year.
It was the equivalent to 15 bottles of vodka or 35 bottles of decent Shiraz in total. Over 200 pints down the pub. Measuring it in vodka somehow makes it sound worse, but the amount of alcohol is the same, however you dress it up.
So with each subsequent year I’ve tried to bring this down. I don’t have any current plans to stop altogether, although I think it would be relatively easy to do so now. And as approach the end of 2024, I’m likely to come in this year at just under 4 units per week (two small beers, or one large glass of wine). This is my driest year yet but it still adds up to a gallon of vodka – which does make you wonder about these ‘safe’ levels.
I’ve learned a lot about my drinking habits, just by writing down one number each week. I’ve found, for example, that I drink a shocking amount in the last two weeks of December. Most of us probably do, but the spike from ‘not much’ to ‘really quite a lot’ was stark.
I’ve also found that my alcohol consumption is more dependent on frequency than depth – that is, my heaviest weeks are when I’ve had a couple of drinks each day, over a lot of days, rather than necessarily a massive session on any one day. It’s grazing rather than bingeing.
At least some of that is probably down to my kids – not just because life is too busy to be hitting the bottle every night, and I often need to drive someone somewhere – but also because as they get towards drinking age themselves, their attitude towards alcohol is really quite different to what I remember mine being at that age. By and large, they don’t understand why anyone drinks.
There has been a steady stream of news articles over the past couple of years reporting that Generation Z are drinking less. A YouGov survey found 44% percent of drinkers between 18 to 24 say they occasionally or regularly order low or non-alcoholic drinks, while a study from 2020 found that the portion of college-age Americans who are teetotal has risen from 20% to 28% in a decade.
Depending on which survey you read, anything from 18% to 27% of people of any age are saying they don’t drink at all.
A related BBC article notes that:
“Gen Zers are growing up in a unique social landscape where, weighed down by financial and societal worries, they’re more risk averse. They have a nuanced understanding of how drinking impacts their health and that of people around them. Consequently, a youth culture that has de-normalised drinking is flourishing.”
Cost may well also be a factor (it’s really expensive to go to the pub these days) – 22-year-old Lola also explains that “People… think it’s cool when people go out sober,” she explains. “It’s a you-do-you mentality where people are respectful of your choices, whether you’re protecting your mental health, or just don’t fancy it.”
That’s a far cry from how things were like when I was a student (at least, it was in the company I kept).
But reporting is not always consistent. A survey from the charity DrinkAware found that 16-24 year olds were the most likely to binge drink (that is, having more than eight units in one session), although they were also the group most likely to be teetotal;
And it was 55-64 year olds that were most likely to exceed the recommended levels on multiple days in a week. Which probably explains all those birthday cards that say ‘It’s Gin O’Clock’ and ‘It’s Always 5 o’clock somewhere’.
So if you’re aiming or hoping to not stop drinking, but just bring it down a level or two, here’s a few tips I’ve learned.
1. The simple act of keeping track seems to reduce the amount you drink, by virtue of making you more conscious of the drinks that you do have.
2. My two rules of thumb are to only have a drink when I really want one, and to only drink things I really like. This avoids ‘landfill drinking’ and makes it a treat rather than a habit.
3. Embrace early mornings - running, or having anything else that makes you want to get up, fresh, in the morning, makes a huge difference. Build the habit in your mind by telling yourself ‘I got up and did x because I didn’t drink the night before’.
4. Get away from the mindset that you’re depriving yourself by not having a drink; replace it with other things that you look forward to - for me, that’s an alco-free beer on a Friday, or a hot chocolate, a coffee or a kombucha.
Non-alcoholic drinks really help and the choice keeps getting better. It’s not just a question of a Diet Coke or a glass of water any more.
5. It’s often frequency of drinking that pushes the numbers up – if you drink regularly but not heavily, you may well find you’re putting away far more than you realised. So start by reducing the number of days you have a drink, which will also break the habit.
6. If you hang out with friends that drink a lot, or frequently, you are far more likely to do the same. So look for opportunities to hang out with different people, or in settings where a drink isn’t the norm, like a sport club or something cerebral.
7. And start the way you mean to continue – January is the easiest month to be dry in, so begin there and give your numbers a kickstart.
Curiously, I’ve also found that having more in December makes it easier to not drink in January; there’s something about feeling a bit shabby on New Year’s Day that really helps to start a healthier month in the right way.
But either way, I’m enjoying life more for drinking less, and that’s good enough for now.