On The Booze: A Survey

Wednesday, September 9, 2009 7:20 | Filed in Beer, Life, Science

There was a lot in the press recently about English holidaymakers drinking a lot of alcohol whilst on holiday. One quote in particular caught my eye:

English holidaymakers are turning to drink on their breaks with the average adult consuming eight alcoholic drinks a day, a survey suggests.BBC News: English Turn To Booze On Holiday

This struck me as noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, the sheer amount. Eight drinks per day would amount to 112 pints over the course of a fortnight’s holiday, which is surely a little excessive. I mean, I’ve been known to take a real ale or two in my time, but that is way out of my league. Unless maybe they mean people average four pints per day, which would be eight units. That sounds a bit more plausible…

Secondly, by my reckoning I only had about fifteen alcoholic drinks in total when I was on holiday (although I did have more than half of these in one evening), so I am “owed” another 97. I’m not sure whether or not I’m allowed to spread them out over the rest of the year, or whether I am somehow obliged to have fifteen drinks a day the next time I am on holiday in order to even it out…

But the figures just seemed too high to be right. And I couldn’t find the actual survey results anywhere (although plenty of media sources appeared to have regurgitated the press release), so I thought I’d contact Know Your Limits (the NHS site behind it) myself to see if I could find out more.

Disappointingly, I wasn’t able to get my hands on the data itself, which reduces my confidence in the data — if the results aren’t available to double-check, we’re asked to simply assume that no mistakes have been made anywhere in the calculations. They might be right, but as far as I am concerned, anyone wanting to throw statistics or survey results at me needs to provide access to the data (or at least a tabulated format of it) if they want me to trust it. They don’t have to hand the results to me, but they ought to be available if I want to go looking for them.

If they provide no way for me to check it, I am not going to put too much stock in the results.

Anyway, when I contacted Know Your Limits, they did say that while they were unable to extract the results for me (if I understood right, it was part of a larger survey) but they were able to provide me with the original copy of the press release, which had a bit more information on it.

This clarified some of my original questions. Firstly, it was indeed 8 alcoholic drinks per day, not units…

With the typical summer break lasting ten days, that’s 80 alcoholic drinks over one holiday; 80 pints of beer is equivalent to 227 unitsSummer Drinking National FINAL

…bloody hell, that is rather a lot. They also managed to break down the drinks consumed to some extent:

beer lovers consumed an average of five pints a day. Wine drinkers lapped up four standard glasses of wine each day, while spirit drinkers admitted to having five mixer drinks, such as vodka and coke, each day. Drinkers also admitted to downing four other alcoholic drinks, such as strong cocktails or shots each daySummer Drinking National FINAL

But it was a couple of other bits that really surprised me. Firstly, a bit saying that about a quarter of holidaymakers admitted to drinking more than three times more than usual. Now let’s play about with the stats here. The sample size was 3,500 or so, of which 1,611 ‘qualified’ (adults who had taken a summer holiday this year).

If 1,611 averaged eight drinks per day, that’s 12,888 alcoholic drinks between them. If the highest drinking 27% (those drinking 3x their normal amount) managed 16 alcoholic drinks per day, that’s 6960 drinks between those 434 people. Leaving everyone else still averaging over 5 alcoholic drinks per day, 35 pints — or 70 units — per week.

Surely this can’t be right, otherwise we’d be having thousands and thousands of people returning from holiday each year with a barely-functioning liver. Although this would go some way to explaining why people keep talking about alcohol-related disease costing the NHS vast quantities of cash. I’m still finding a lot of the stats quite difficult to believe, though:

one in five people (19%) surveyed in the ICM poll pledged to take two days off drinking a week;Summer Drinking National FINAL

Am I to understand from this that 81% of the adults surveyed are going to be having an alcoholic drink at least six days a week? Again, surely this can’t be right — I will generally get myself out once or twice a week, so there are usually at least five days in a given week when I don’t have a drink. I accept that I’m probably slightly unusual in the sense that I practically never drink in the house, but still, I find it difficult to believe that most adults are drinking virtually every day…

Which is why I’d feel a lot more confident in the stats if I could actually see the raw data and/or the ‘weighting’ which they say has been applied to it (although I have been told that the weighting was based on a more accurate population survey so shouldn’t have thrown this out), but even so, without being able to see the actual raw data, I cannot bring myself to entirely trust the statistics derived from it, although I can accept that it was at least a reasonably large sample size.

So while I’m disappointed with Know Your Units — a health site really ought to show the information they are using to back up their claims with, particularly when they are as astonishing as this — I’m pleased with the person I was dealing with at Know Your Units for providing the help she did (she went out of her way to answer questions about the stats and the data, although she didn’t have access to the data itself), and I’m also pleased to discover that they’ve got a tetris-style game based on the number of units in drinks. Whether or not it actually helps anyone learn the amount of units in a drink remains to be seen, but it’s a larf

And then of course, there’s one final thing: the recommendation of how much people should actually drink. They seem to have backed away somewhat from the ‘x number of units per week’ approach, instead now going with:

The NHS recommends women should not regularly drink more than 2-3 units a day (around one large glass of wine) and men should not regularly drink more than 3-4 units a day (two pints of beer) . [...] ‘Regularly’ means drinking every day or most days of the week.Summer Drinking National FINAL

So my understanding is what what they are saying is that if (as a man) you drink more than two pints most days, this is bad for you. Which led me to wonder about the ‘binge drinking’ measures, as while it’s unusual for me to drink more than twice in a week, I might well have more than a couple of pints each time…

There is no consistently agreed measure of ‘binge drinking’. More than eight units for men and more than six units for women on any one day is used as a measure of binge drinking in the population, but individuals vary and the vital thing is to avoid drinking to intoxicationKnow Your Limits FAQ

So this tells us two things: firstly that virtually that the majority of British holidaymakers are going to spend their entire holiday binge-drinking (again, I find this implausible: what about the non-drinkers, people with small children who drink less?) as an average of eight drinks will be well past eight units, but also that there’s no specific measure of binge drinking — basically, it’s saying you can go out and have a nice time, but don’t get too pissed. In other words, if you go out and drink reasonably sensibly a couple of times a week, that’s pretty much okay.

Well, I’ll drink to that…!

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44 Comments to On The Booze: A Survey

  1. Mike says:

    September 9th, 2009 at 7:43 am

    All the top statement (I can’t be bothered to read all the rest; time is money) says is “the average adult consumes…”, which is different to “an adult consumes an average of…”.

    Simply put: you’re not an ‘average adult’, whatever *that* might mean…
    :-\

  2. Richard says:

    September 9th, 2009 at 9:09 am

    :-|

    Is is bad that those figures stated seem like a relatively quiet night? I must be doing it wrong since on holiday (when I ever take one), I tend to drink distinctly less.

  3. Ian says:

    September 9th, 2009 at 10:15 am

    I can’t say I find those finding too surprising. In my younger days I used to go on holiday with my friends and drink in excess of eight drinks a night for the duration of the whole two week holiday. It’s not hard to do when you are out from say 8pm until 3am—only just over 1 drink per hour. In fact, on reflection, I’m guessing I drunk considerably more than 8 drinks every night. None of the people I was on holiday with would have a drink throughout the day so it’s safe to say that those that do would be drinking far in excess of my own already high average number of drinks.

    Even now when on holiday with my wife and kids I’ll share a bottle of wine over dinner and perhaps have another 1 or 2 glasses of wine on my return to our residence. That’s 5 drinks right there and I wouldn’t consider that excessive in the slightest.

    On the whole, when back in the UK, I tend not to drink at all although perhaps once in a while I’ll share a bottle of wine with my wife on a weekend.

  4. JackP says:

    September 9th, 2009 at 11:52 am

    Mike, don’t know whether you’re deliberately missing the point or you’ve just failed to understand it, but they are talking about the mean, not a median. So if some adults are drinking less than this, others are drinking correspondingly more.

    But of course you’d have known that if you’d read the article :-)

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