UK drinkers look at alcohol guidelines, laugh, and have another beer

You will be shocked to hear that, according to a new report in the journal Addiction, the UK government's drinking guidelines are incompatible with the UK's drinking habits. Solving the problem might lie in a counterintuitive update: accepting the reality of binge drinking.

The guidelines suggest a number of alcohol "units" per day that shouldn't be regularly exceeded—2-3 units per day for women, 3-4 units for men. But because people in the UK often go days without drinking and then go on a giant bender, the guidelines aren't all that useful. They don't say anything about reasonable limits for someone who wants to drink more heavily on one night out of seven.

The researchers conducted interviews with 66 people across England and Scotland, grouping people according to age, gender, and socioeconomic background. They found that the guidelines didn’t fit with the actual role of alcohol in people’s lives: aside from not giving any advice for occasional binge drinking, the use of “units” made people’s eyes glaze over. Calculating units on the fly isn't exactly what you want to be doing on Friday evening at the pub, so people are more inclined to keep track of how many glasses or bottles they’ve had.

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