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America has a drinking problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: America has a drinking problem

#411

Post by pstuart »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #313
quadyeast wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that chart does not make sense to me unless >10% of Americans are AA. I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk

A lot of people don't like alcoholic beverages at all. I have member of my family that despise the taste of alcohol. Then, we have people like myself, and my father, whom self medicate. (I hate the taste of all alcohol. I only drink it for the effect. To the problem drinkers out there, don't even think about going to hard alcohol. Stick to low alcohol beer, and wine. Box wine can have as little as 9% alcohol. Naltrex…

Kratom is a great replacement for alcohol for such use. It has its abuse potential as well, but is zero calorie and hangover-free and doesn't damage your liver. Of course everybody responds differently, but it's been incredibly valuable to me for this need.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#412

Post by munificent »

sjg007 wrote: post #43
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

The statistics about alcohol consumption are so stunning that I often wonder how accurate they are. If these numbers are correct, the top 10% of alcohol drinkers consume the equivalent of 10 drinks per day : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think... The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in…

Like everything alcohol consumption is a power law.

Many things are power laws, but many things are not. It's really easy to overfit your intuition here and assume it's all power laws, but that's an overcorrection from everyone previously assuming everything was a normal distribution.

The reality is that some stuff is power laws, some stuff is normal, some stuff is bimodal, etc. The more useful mental exercise is to try to learn what the actual distribution for something is, instead of assuming, and then try to dig in a bit more to figure out what causes might lead to that.

Power laws tend to arise when you have some amount of network effect and an iterative positive feedback loop. That shows up in popularity, wealth, etc. But things like, you know, height, are not a power law distribution.

Alcohol consumption does have some steep curve to that, but it's not clear if it's actually a power law. I assume its driven by both addiction times tolerance. In other words, if you couldn't build up a tolerance to alcohol, I'd expect something like a linear distribution reflecting levels of a addiction. But the more you drink, the higher your tolerance, so the more you need to drink, which leads to something more like quadratic or higher.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#413

Post by notdeadofdrink »

bradleyjg wrote: post #389
notdeadofdrink wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the top decile of that posted chart. Some weeks I'll be higher, some weeks I'll be lower. Usually lower, but always above the ninth. Posting on a throwaway for what should be pretty obvious reasons. In the past week I've had about three bottles of gin in various cocktails, assorted craft beers of the IPA or imperial stout variety, a couple of whiskeys, and an aperitif most days. I've been drinking mostly while…

I appreciate the response. Mostly I hate throwaways but this is an appropriate use. As I’ve gotten older (I’m 40ish) hangovers have gotten worse and worse. It’s now to the point if I have 4-5 medium beers on Friday night I can write off Saturday. Has your subjective experience of hangovers gotten easier over time?

I've have never had much in the way of hangovers in my life, with the exception of the few times that I have gotten nearly blackout drunk and spent the next day curled up around a toilet bowl.

I tend to drink more on Friday and Saturday nights, and I will wake up the next morning feeling seedy and in need of a big greasy breakfast.

Weekday mornings, if I have had more than usual (by my own standards) to drink the previous night, I will wake up feeling like I slept poorly, but no more than that. It'll take me an hour to get up to speed, and then I'm likely to go to bed earlier than usual that night.

None of this has changed noticeably over the past decade.

It may or may not make a difference that I am meticulous about getting 8.5 hours in bed each night, I don't know, and it may make a difference that I've always had a fairly high tolerance for alcohol's effects.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#414

Post by alexobenauer »

crackercrews wrote: post #246
kevinmchugh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Club soda (or flavored seltzer) + bitters. There's alcohol there still but less than half a percent ABV. Not enough that it tastes boozy or impairs my judgement. Drinking one relatively low ABV beer impairs my judgement enough that a second drink sounds like a good idea, the soda and bitters never does that for me.

How are bitters with plain seltzer? I have a sodastream and am looking for some good flavors. Can't figure out anything that tastes as good as flavored bubly or lacroix and that doesn't have lots of sugar.

If you haven't tried them yet, Bubly makes drops for Sodastream.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#415

Post by cecilpl2 »

Rapzid wrote: post #179
fokinsean wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The end of the drinking activities don't leave me sleepy or craving bad food. I can go home and read a book or get some work done. This is one of my biggest motivations for reducing my drinking during the week. Even having just one or two beers after work, the probability that I read or work on a side project drops close to 0.

This is also why I very rarely day-drink. Couple beers in afternoon and if I even stop nothing productive happens for the rest of the day. Even if something productive did happen I would get tired and have to take a nap. Now my sleep schedule is even more wrecked. Strictly a night drinker.

Same here. A drink at lunch and the rest of my day is pretty much shot, so it's only happening if I'm on vacation or my plan was to lie on the beach all day anyway.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#418

Post by crackercrews »

alexobenauer wrote: post #414
crackercrews wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are bitters with plain seltzer? I have a sodastream and am looking for some good flavors. Can't figure out anything that tastes as good as flavored bubly or lacroix and that doesn't have lots of sugar.

If you haven't tried them yet, Bubly makes drops for Sodastream.

Whoa, game-changing. When I got my sodastream they just had lousy syrups. If these are like the canned bubly drinks then that will be amazing.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#419

Post by spodek »

samatman wrote: post #349
jmcdl wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common refrain but at the same time it seems to be the one substance commonly used across most of the world since ancient times. None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous. Perhaps there's a good reason for this (besides varying availability of other substances)?

Nope, I'm quite convinced it's the varying availability of the other substances. Coffee, tea, and tobacco, became at least as widespread once global trade made that possible. Coca was late to the party because it doesn't grow well outside of its native region. Cannabis is an odd one, in that it was extremely widespread and making solid inroads in Europe and North America, when it became a weapon for United States rac…

You left out refined sugar in its many forms. In total deaths and disease as well as cost to society dwarfs everything. The combination of being legal, advertised, and by some measures as addictive as any others is tough to beat.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#420

Post by User23 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #135

Article mirrors my experience. For context I'm German, my wife's French and we've got family in Croatia who own a vineyard so I'm used to being around alcohol and people drinking. My first impression when I spent time was in the US was indeed how bipolar drinking is compared to Europe. We probably drink a hell of a lot more in raw terms than the average American does.Two glasses of wine for dinner, another one in the…

Germany has a drinking problem[1].

[1] https://movendi.ngo/news/2019/04/18/study-germany-has-an-alc...

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