unsplash / chuttersnap
Alcohol consumption across the United States of America has spiked throughout 2020 compared to recent years and I could pull literally hundreds of sources to support that claim but it’s been exhaustively covered by the media so far and I assume you’ve seen those headlines by now.
Could some of us scale back our weekly alcohol consumption? Sure. But will we ever scale that back to just one drink a day? That’s gonna be a hard ‘no’ from me.
According to a recent report, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (est. 1980s) has the current alcohol recommendations for men at just two drinks a day. That sounds like an extremely small amount of alcohol to me but at the same time, drinking two drinks every single day sounds absurdly excessive. Forbes is reporting that the committee is exploring changing that recommendation to just one drink per day:
Currently, in the U.S., the recommended limit for alcohol use is no more than two drinks per day for men, where “a drink” contains around 0.6 ounces of pure alcohol.
However, Politico is reporting that the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s new draft report advises that amount should be decreased.
“For those who drink alcohol, recommended limits for better health are up to 1 drink per day for both women and men,” the committee said.
Consuming the current limit of two drinks per day is associated with a “modest but meaningful increase” in death rates due to all causes, compared with just one drink per day, the panel said.
…
…
…
“We found that those drinking within moderate guidelines, even though they are following the low-risk drinking guidelines still in one year, experienced about 140 more deaths and nearly 4000 hospital stays than they would have if they had instead abstained,” said Adam Sherk, a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Victoria. (via)
I think I speak for a lot of us when I say: listen up, dork, I’m here for a good time not a long time and I won’t be able to accomplish that by drinking just one alcoholic drink a day. Ya feel me?
If ‘stress is the silent killer’ and a few drinks is what’s helping people stave off the stress as the world collapses week after week in 2020 then maybe two drinks a day is perfectly fine. It certainly seems like a weird time in history to nitpick over 140 annual deaths, doesn’t it?
Cass is a partner at BroBible and he’s been found here for the better part of a decade. He’s based out of Florida and you can contact him on Twitter at @casspa or via email cass@brobible.com