I’ll start this one by asking you a sort of
tricky question that I also asked several friends: when t comes to binge
drinking, what’s the demographic group (in terms of age) with the largest
number of binge drinkers among it?
Binge drinking, let me remind you, is
generally defined as having 5 or more alcoholic drinks in one sitting (although
if you do consume 5 or more alcoholic drinks in a session you won’t stay seated
for long of course, given how often you’ll have to get up to visit the toilet).
Anyway, I’m sure that like everyone I
asked, most of you would probably have responded that the age of the group most
culpable of binge drinking is roughly 20-30 or so, and that’s all because, I
think, of all the media attention that binge drinking among college-age kids
has received the last few years.
However, according to a very up-to-date
report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although binge
drinking among young adults and older teenagers is indeed a huge and rising
problem, and yes, that age group does have the highest percentage of binge drinkers in its midst, the greatest overall
number of binge drinker in America are actually seniors, that is people over
the age of 65, with one in 6 American seniors, according to the CDC, suffering
from a binge drinking problem.
So no matter your age, please always
remember this about alcohol: like nearly everything else in life, a little bit
of alcohol is good for you, a lot is not, and too much, especially if drunk too
soon, is actually harmful.
Originally posted on the London Drugs Blog - January 10th, 2012
