Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

America has a drinking problem

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 938 posts

Re: America has a drinking problem

#461

Post by casion »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #16
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…

Honestly, as someone who has 2-3 drinks per day, I've always been more surprised by the amount of people who basically don't drink at all. In that chart it's over half of Americans. Travel a bit, any you'll quickly discover that a couple drinks in the evening is basically normal in much of the world. I'm not arguing that it's healthy (it's not), but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values r…

Lest we not forget the many, many people who simply can not stand the taste of alcohol. There's quite a few people that fall into that category.

Some of us can't even stand fermented breads, let alone a light wine.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#462

Post by Marsymars »

buu700 wrote: post #351
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk Most people I associate with don’t drink anything on an average week. It’s likely that you’re in a bit of a bubble if you can’t think of anyone who doesn’t drink in an average week.

Yeah, that's an odd statement to me. I don't not drink , but I also don't go out of my way to drink that often. Even considering the mean rather than median, I'm pretty sure that I fall short of 52 drinks/year. I wouldn't necessarily assume that I'm in the majority, but it's not as though my behavior in this area is particularly abnormal.

I get how one could pretty easily fall into a group of people who drink on a weekly (or more frequent) basis.

That being said, of people I'm close to, my parents are a good counter-example. They split one beer every month or so.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#463

Post by Sophistifunk »

plandis wrote: post #441
Sophistifunk wrote: post #423

People have the cause and effect backwards in my opinion. You know why "binge drinking" isn't a problem in Germany, except for when the Australians turn up for Oktoberfest? It's because you can just buy a beer on the side of the road with your currywurst, and drink it without being hassled. If you act up, you get arrested for acting up. Try openly having a few beers in the park in Australia or the US, you'll be run o…

I regularly go out and have picnics with my wife and have never once been harassed about sharing a bottle of wine with our meal. My family goes camping over Memorial Day weekend to state parks all over Ohio and it’s pretty common to have alcoholic drinks but, as long as you’re not bothering anyone, nobody cares. We’ve been doing this for as long as I’ve been alive and not once has anyone cared in 30+ years. The US ha…

Firstly, I'm clearly not talking about camping. I'm talking about parks in the suburbs and cities. Secondly, "having a wine with my wife" is treated very differently from "having some beers with my fellow twenty-somethings," without needing to bring in the extra baggage that would be included if those twenty-somethings happen to be black.

I'm sure I can drink a wine in the park with my wife too, now that I'm old. Doesn't make it OK the way the police treat the young and/or brown.

And no, for what it's worth, it's not as bad in the US as it is here, because Americans (generally) respect the freedoms of others much more than Australians do. Which is why in my experience the subsequent dickheaddery isn't as prevalent or extreme there either.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#464

Post by rsync »

Some of the most interesting and illuminating words I have read on the subject of addiction (and specifically, alcohol addiction) were on the old "Dive Into Mark" blog by Mark Pilgrim.[1]

I still miss his blog and his writing from time to time ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim

Re: America has a drinking problem

#465

Post by Phillipharryt »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #423

People have the cause and effect backwards in my opinion. You know why "binge drinking" isn't a problem in Germany, except for when the Australians turn up for Oktoberfest? It's because you can just buy a beer on the side of the road with your currywurst, and drink it without being hassled. If you act up, you get arrested for acting up. Try openly having a few beers in the park in Australia or the US, you'll be run o…

Australia allows drinking in parks unless it's a designated no-drinking area (usually any area outside an alcohol store). That being said different states in Aus handle alcohol differently and some are very strict. The major states of NSW and Vic are pretty chill though.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#466

Post by rkk3 »

leafmeal wrote: post #294
jacobolus wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the pyramids were being built, the builders were paid in beer. Yeah, because water used to be much harder to sanitize, and “beer” (thick, lumpy, mildly alcoholic – think fermented porridge) is basically liquid bread. Doing manual labor all day takes a lot of calories, and cereals are much cheaper than alternative foods. It’s hardly a healthy diet though. Keeping peasants drunk enough to be pliable is a side be…

> because water used to be much harder to sanitize They actually addressed this in the article, but sanitizing water is as simple as boiling it which is much less involved than the process of making beer.

> sanitizing water is as simple as boiling It may be simple but it takes a lot of energy to boil & you can't store it. They didn't have the convenience of electric kettles.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#467

Post by Marsymars »

lemonberry wrote: post #357
pedalpete wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar boat. I stopped, but without a timeframe for how long. I just knew I had to cut back, but that wasn't working well, so I just stopped, and when I was offered a drink, I'd say "I don't drink", because here in Australia, I find if you say no to a drink, it's mostly forced on you. The statement put an end to that. However, I also internalized being an non-drinker. It became part of my identity. I don't…

My favorite non-alcoholic beverage is equal parts soda water and tonic water, a couple of splashes of orange juice and a few dashes of bitters. Tweak as necessary. At the holidays I like non-alcoholic sparkling apple juice. I also find soda water out of a can to be a good beer replacement on hot days. I think part of this is the sound of opening the can and the carbonation. No idea if any of those will fit your needs…

Having tried many drinks, I try to trend away from acidic ones for the sake of my teeth.

Doesn't leave much though. Peppermint tea.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#468

Post by netflixandkill »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #336
netflixandkill wrote: post #319

America has problems with drinking, opioids, meth, prescription abuse, vaping bizarre things, health care, mental health, domestic violence, domestic terrorism and violent crime, school shootings and suicides because America has a misery problem. A few decades of bootstrap vs welfare paint don't fix the rotted and failing structure of a culture, if it can even be called that anymore, that had replaced well being with…

Was that supposed to be a backhanded way to call some large chunks of Europe "undeveloped" or did you just forget about Eastern Europe and all the economically less stable countries on the Mediteranean? Alcoholism, poor mental health care, domestic violence, suicide, etc. etc. are all alive and well on the other side of the pond too. Just not in the "scandanavia plus rich parts of western Europe" parts that HN likes…

That's a bizarre way to read two independent sentences. I don't know if any given eastern European nations counts as developed in your terms, but pretty much all of them with similar HDI or whatever other metric to the United States have their own problems, but not to anything like the degree seen in the US.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#470

Post by rkk3 »

tolbish wrote: post #239
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep. For many of us, it's not about Puritanical values. We simply choose healthier behaviors. It's true that the median alcohol drinkers in America doesn't drink much at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the population. Drinkers tend to cluster with other drinkers, and non-drinkers tend to become less interested with a…

How recent is your data? As of 2015, 18% of Americans are binge drinkers: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...

Binge Drinking is just having more than 5 drinks in a few hour time period, doesn't have to be everyday can just be occasionally. Its a pretty low threshold, compared to the article's top decile which you need to drink which is averaging above 9 drinks a day.
Post reply on HN