“We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage,” Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges, acting Unit Lead for Noncommunicable Disease Management and Regional Advisor for Alcohol and Illicit Drugs in the WHO Regional Office for Europe explained.
I feel like we don’t hear this enough. Smoking is being targeted by policies a lot more than drinking, while drinking comes with a heavy burden on society too (alcoholism, violence etc.).
Also people don’t drink alcohol because it’s safe and healthy but because it’s fun or because they are addicted.
Well, sometimes there’s also social pressure, to ‘just drink one beer’. My mum tells me that also used to be a thing for cigarettes. I feel like that died off, because people became aware of the health effects.
Cigarettes also used to be marketed as healthy. But in general - it’s a really good skill to learn to deal with social pressure. But I feel like it’s also better with the new generation - or at least inside the rather specific bubble I’m part of.
Alcoholism comes with great burdens on society and is definetely an issue. But in the communication we need to talk about how “risk” is used as a term in the scientific discourse and public discourse. Both scientifically and by common sense it is obvious, that there is a huge gap in the health effects of alcohol between someone who drinks a beer or two on the weekend and someone who drinks 10 bottles a day accompanied with a bottle of vodka.
In the same wake, someone who smokes at a party every few weeks has an entirely different risk than someone who smokes two packs a day.
I’m a bit worried, that by creating a misunderstood communication about the dangers of alcohol, we end up in a 1990/2000s style anti Drug propaganda, where risks were broadly exaggerated and people ended up taking the entire program for the joke it was.
Hard disagree on your take on cigarettes. Someone who smoke at a party every few weeks will get to smoke two packs a day in a few years. The addiction on cigarettes is extreme. I’ve never seen anyone smoking a little and staying that way.
Well i did. I know both people that stayed light smokers throughout their life or managed to go from heavy smoking to light smoking.
That is not to say that it isn’t difficult. It certainly is and smoking is highly addictive. There is a wide range of smoking habits and that needs to be considered too. In a transparent communication about risk the point you made, that most people become heavy smokers eventually, is equally important.
I was certain you would answer this.
Problem is that you smoke more than you think, and you’re not as much in controle as you think, and it does yourself more harm, both physically and mentally, than you think.
I don’t smoke tobacco. And in my life i’ve smoked maybe ten cigarettes in total.
Western society is in no way closer to that point. What you’re reading is the counterpoint to “a glass of wine a day is good for your health” when in fact it’s not. People ask “how much can I drink without it affecting my health” and the honest answer is nothing. You’re obviously right that any substance is more dangerous the higher the amount. You also can’t tell beforehand what the exact risk is because this is a statistical question. But just because the outcome is not perfectly predictable doesn’t mean there’s no risk.
Europe‘s heaviest drinkers
I finally made it! I‘m in the news!
Drinking is good for the economy!
It probably isn’t with all the entailing health problems.
Can somebody do the math? There must be a perfect spot for drinking.
The beach?
Not alone in the cellar?
I strongly suspect that spot is around 0ml of alcohol since it is not as if people do not consume liquids if those liquids do not contain alcohols.
Alcohol is a fun drug, that’s why people are consuming it (besides addiction) - it allows for easier social interactions and a general more lose atmosphere, some people use it to unwind. So it has just completely different use cases than liquids not containing alcohol.
My point was that people would still buy drinks so you can’t count every sale of some alcoholic beverage as an economic benefit and overall alcohol has a lot of economic downsides for society to the point where it would surprise me very much if the tiny little bit of extra people spend on alcohol compared to other drinks would make up for that.
That’s why I was curious if someone would care to actually do some calculations, since I can speculate on that question just as good as you do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshine_by_country
This is about the officially sold alcohol, but depending on the country the amount of illegally or legally made alcohol at home might be way higher.
So Germans consume way too much official alcohol, but the production of moonshine is very low, while a country like Czechia has a high official consumption and on top many citizen produce slivovice in their garage or cellar. Worse: The amount of pure alcohol in these selfmade moonshine variants isn’t regulated and often way higher than in official drinks.
Wow
TurkeyTürkiye surely has the worst drinking, only 1.2L/person per annum, we call that “Saturday evening” here in Germany, especially during Carnival /sEdit: this is meant as a joke, of course
The L/annum means “pure” alcohol. Nobody is drinking 1,2L of pure alcohol an evening. That’s the equivalent of 3L 40% Schnaps, or
12L24L 5% beer.That technicality aside, alcohol is incredibly expensive in Türkiye. It’s basically west European prices by now (for beer), and even more expensive than western Europe for everything else. Also the numbers are probably higher than the 1,2L because a lot of people started making their own alcohol - because of the cost of buying it from the markets.
24L of 5% beer *
Ha, correct. Originally I wanted to write how many beer cans/bottles, which are mostly 0,5L here. Then I decided against it, and mind abscently made the multiplication into the other direction.
I was pretty freaked out when I walked through Friedrichshafen on a holiday trip and people sat there on the shore of Bodensee and drank beer at like 8am.
Why would you freak out over people enjoying themselves?
As someone who has had close friends die due to alcoholism, I’m not so relaxed about that.
