How Much Alcohol Do You Really Drink?

Be honest: We kid ourselves when we pour

I set out to do Dry January, but ended up doing a tidier version I’m calling Dry Jan, which ended last week. Just being forthright here, so you know I’m not preaching. While I’m fully aware that alcohol is bad for my health, I enjoy it. I acknowledge I’m making a tradeoff between temporary joy and long-term health, and I try to moderate my intake. I eat ice cream sometimes, too. OK, I eat ice cream a lot. I love ice cream!

Otherwise I have a pretty healthy diet, exercise regularly, and sleep well most nights. I lean into moderation in many things. But that’s not what I came here to tell you.

Here’s the confession I feel compelled to make:

When I pour myself a stiff drink or a glass of wine, I don’t typically measure the serving size. When I do get precise, I’m always surprised how little booze is in “one drink.” Just last night, for example, I was drinking vodka with fresh-squeezed lemon, and I didn’t bother to measure. I’m feeling the effects of that imprecision today.

I also like beer, which conveniently comes in pre-measured single servings. Thing is, many brews today pack more alcohol by volume than a typical beer back in the day. I used to drink a couple Michelobs and sleep fine. They’re around 4.2% ABV. Now, two microbrew IPAs—at 6% to 7% ABV—is a dodgy proposition for this 150-pound aging guy.

Is it just me?

What’s in your glass?

When scientists, doctors and other experts talk about “one drink,” here’s what they mean:

You may not want to hear this, but it’s well established that any amount of alcohol is bad for our health, and more is decidedly worse. Alcohol is said to shorten the lives of 93,000 people in the United States every year, by an average of 29 years. The grim stats owe to everything from liver disease and heart attacks to factors like homicides, falls and car crashes, which no doubt skew the stats. But still.

Now, you might be thinking: Didn’t we used to hear that a drink or two is good for us? Yes, that was the official line. But numerous studies in recent years have overturned that erroneous conclusion. Here’s what happened:

A big flaw in many previous studies of alcohol consumption is that they included people who had quit drinking for health reasons, and so got recorded as unhealthy nondrinkers. Meanwhile, many people who drank may have been healthy at the time a study was done. A review of 45 studies, done in 2017, accounted for that. It found that late-life nondrinkers don’t drink because they’re in poor health, while older people who aren’t sick tend to drink. But it’s not the drinking that led to their health status, the researchers say, leading to their conclusion that there’s no benefit to moderate drinking.

Through better study methods, scientists have gained additional insights since realizing the error of their statistical ways. As I wrote last year:

Just one drink can immediately raise your risk of an irregular heartbeat, known as atrial fibrillation, which ups the odds of an eventual heart attack or stroke.

Several other investigations suggest similar negative consequences to moderate drinking. A 2019 study found that people who have seven to 13 drinks per week are 53% more likely than nondrinkers to have high blood pressure, known to presage debilitating diseases and shortened lives. A study last year linked moderate drinking to accelerated shrinkage of the brain and a higher risk of dementia.

Try smaller glasses

If you enjoy drinking and would like to just keep a lid on it, or perhaps you’re trying to cut back, smaller serving sizes might be helpful, a new study suggests.

The research, published Jan. 18 in the journal PLOS Medicine, found that when pubs and restaurants in England removed their largest serving-size options for wine from the menu — typically around 8.4 ounces (250 ml) — people drank less. Total wine sales across the 21 establishments in the study fell 7.6%, with no increase in sales of other alcohol types. (For the record, revenue didn’t fall, likely because the price per ounce is higher for smaller glasses, the researchers say.)

“This suggests that this is a promising intervention for decreasing alcohol consumption across populations, which merits consideration as part of alcohol licensing regulations,” the authors conclude.

Similar research in 2020, which synthesized various experiments on glass sizes in UK drinking establishments, reached similar conclusions. When glasses were smaller, people drank less — including when they’d ordered wine by the carafe and poured it themselves.

“We all like to think we’re immune to subtle influences on our behavior — like the size of a wine glass — but research like this clearly shows we’re not,” said study team member Ashley Adamson, a director of research at the UK’s National Institute of Health Research.

This is not advice!

Please know that none of this is meant to be advice. It’s just a set of observations about reality, both in science and in human proclivities and weaknesses. I’m certainly not suggesting anyone should drink alcohol.

Did I mention that alcohol is really bad for you? You should quit, seriously.

There are resources to help curb alcohol use or stop altogether. The national SAMHSA hotline is an excellent place to start. You can find helpful suggestions from Harvard Health, the American Addiction Centers, the UK National Health Service, and numerous other searchable sources.

Meanwhile, we can agree that a 7.6% pullback, as observed in the new study, is relatively small potatoes. But with alcohol, any reduction in quantity can mean better sleep, better mood and more clarity the next day, and improved physical and mental health in the long run.

I’ve got no clue whether smaller serving sizes would translate into the reduction found in the study. Your home is presumably not a pub, after all, so the conditions under which you drink are different.

But I know this: When my wife and I recently decided to measure our pours of some expensive bourbon — because it was, you know, expensive — we ended up with less in the glass than normal. We really savored that bourbon, and measuring it out created a greater awareness of how much we normally drink. They say awareness is Step 1 in change, and I think we’re roughly 7.6% more thoughtful now about how much we pour into the evening drinks we enjoy.

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