Moderate Drinking Explained: Guidelines, Definition, & FAQs

Heavy drinking, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), is binge drinking on five or more days within one month. The contents of this website are for educational purposes and are not intended to offer personal medical advice. You should seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

The rapid progress in computer technology, however, has led to the development and use of computer-assisted telephone interview systems. Because they are considerably less costly than face-to-face interviews, telephone surveys are rapidly gaining popularity among survey researchers. Scientists are divided as to whether the assessment mode influences reported alcohol consumption. Recent studies have found no significant differences between in-person and telephone interviews on most measures of drinking behavior (Greenfield et al. 1997; Rehm 1998). When analyzing the results of QF measures, researchers can use several formulas to multiply the frequency of alcohol consumption and the average amount consumed.

Health Conditions

Systematic epidemiological sociological surveys of the general U.S. population began in the 1960s. Most of those national and community studies were sponsored by NIAAA and its predecessor within the National Institute of Mental Health. Since 1965 researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley, California, have conducted, at approximately 5-year intervals, nine national surveys as well as numerous community studies. The researchers have invested much effort in maintaining some degree of comparability across surveys, despite changing definitions and conceptualizations of alcohol-use disorders (Grant 1994). Is moderation still the golden rule, or is every sip now a gamble?

When is having any alcohol too much?

1. That usually means four or more drinks within two hours for women and five or more drinks within two hours for men.
2. The researchers have invested much effort in maintaining some degree of comparability across surveys, despite changing definitions and conceptualizations of alcohol-use disorders (Grant 1994).
3. Given the complexity of alcohol’s effects on the body and the complexity of the people who drink it, blanket recommendations about alcohol are out of the question.
4. In addition to the circumstances under which drinking occurs, alcohol’s effects on the drinker (e.g., on the ability to drive a car) depend to a large extent on the blood alcohol levels (BALs) achieved after alcohol consumption.
5. ” In short, the answer from current research is, the less alcohol, the better.

Another study found that it is widely assumed that light or moderate drinking is the safest way to to drink alcohol. “Non‐drinkers, both ex‐drinkers and lifelong teetotalers, consistently show an increased prevalence of conditions likely to increase morbidity and mortality compared with occasional or light drinkers. In addition, regular light drinkers tend to have characteristics extremely advantageous to health,” the authors LSD Effects Short-Term and Long-Term Effects of LSD wrote.

Is moderate drinking heart-healthy?

In the scientific literature, the wide range of assumptions about what a standard drink is can produce highly divergent estimates of total alcohol consumption among respondents who report consuming the same number of drinks. Turner based the comparison on fictional respondents who reported drinking one standard drink (as defined in each study) each of beer, wine, and spirits for a total alcohol consumption of three drinks per day. Using the different methodologies and assumptions regarding alcohol contents employed in four highly respected studies, Turner found that the total alcohol amounts corresponding to three drinks per day ranged from 24 g to 48 g. Consequently, when reading an article that relates a certain number of drinks per day to a specific health benefit or risk, one must pay careful attention to how a drink is defined in that study.

If you’re looking to adopt healthier drinking patterns and better monitor your consumption of alcohol, there are ways to limit your alcohol intake in easy, more manageable ways. Some surveys may address only alcohol consumption, whereas other surveys may assess all food and other nutrient intake, as well as additional health-related behaviors (e.g., smoking and exercise), and include only a few alcohol-specific questions. In diary methods, participants record each drink consumed over a given timeframe (e.g., 1 week), ideally shortly after consumption. Researchers have recently introduced an automated variation of the diary method.

Accordingly, a drink should be defined in terms of alcohol content, so that a drink of beer contains approximately the same amount of alcohol as a drink of wine or spirits. At first glance, this requirement appears to be a simple mathematical problem of comparing the alcohol contents of several beverages. In fact, however, such comparisons are rather complicated, because even within one beverage category (e.g., beer, wine, or distilled spirits), the alcohol contents may differ considerably. Many of these trials have been conducted for weeks, and in a few cases months and even up to 2 years, to look at changes in the blood, but a long-term trial to test experimentally the effects of alcohol on cardiovascular disease has not been done.

Alcohol consumption has been linked to cancers of the breast, colon and rectum, liver, esophagus, voice box, throat, mouth, and probably the pancreas, according to the American Cancer Society. Another study found that one component in red wine may protect the brain from stroke damage. However, these studies were very limited, and no confirmed conclusion has been reached on the link between menstruation and alcohol absorption.