Miscellaneous desk
< May 12	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	May 14 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 13

Do many people drink alcohol every day?

Hi,

I've lived in several countries and I've also traveled a lot for short periods. This year, I went to the French part of Belgium for more than one month, which is an unusual long period of time. After so long, you get to see people in their day-to-day life. What shocked me the most was to see that almost everybody is drinking alcohol every day. They would have a beer every time a guest is coming home, or just after coming back from work or even in the car driving around (including the driver!) and I heard lots of stories about people having drinks at work with colleagues. I've never seen that anywhere else but maybe people do it as well but are less comfortable showing it. According to your experience, is it usual for people to drink every day for almost every occasion? Is it a big thread to their health? I went also to UK where people get really wasted (not unusual to see people lying on the street around bars on Saturday night) but I have no clue if they drink a lot during the week.

203.111.224.70 (talk) 02:51, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

If you want the stats, here are the stats: [1] That there is the WHO's report for alcohol consumption for just about every country in the world, from Algeria to Zimbabwe and everything in between. I doubt you will find a better reference. Unfortunately, no one at this reference desk should answer your other question "according to your experience...", because this isn't the correct venue for that. But if you want to know the experiences of everybody in the world, on a by-country basis, read that WHO report. --Jayron 32 02:58, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Jayron, can you give the page (the pdf has 202 pages) on which they address actual every-day consumption? I googled the question, and the best I could find was "daily consumption" which was actually an average, and had nothing to do with each day independently. μηδείς (talk) 04:51, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Each of the 202 pages has the same statistics, just for a different country. --Jayron 32 10:47, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and Medeis' point is that the report you cite does not help to answer the OP's question, which was about the number of people who drink alcohol every day. Since the report you cite does not answer the question, it would have been preferable not to cite it. --Viennese Waltz 12:07, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The List of countries by alcohol consumption per capita may help. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 11:07, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well (and this is all unsourced OR) Belgium is a bit of a unique proposition where alcohol is concerned, as beer is classed as "liquid bread" and as such, you don't need a licence to sell it. Couple that with the French love of wine with meals and yes, Belgians do drink a lot of alcohol every day in general. (One reason why I love that country so much!) --TammyMoet (talk) 13:20, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Here's some data from the CDC, which only covers the USA [2]. They define "heavy drinking" as 15/week for men, 8/wk for women. Yes, it can be distributed unevenly, but there will be many in that group that drink daily. As of 2008, heavy drinking, as defined by the CDC, had an incidence rate of about 4% in the USA. Note that binge drinking (with a definition that can include heavy drinkers, and often does) is much higher, at about 15% SemanticMantis (talk) 14:10, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The table that Cookatoo linked suggests that adults in Belgium consume a mean of about 12 liters per month of beer and wine, total. That works out to about 3 liters per week, or nearly a pint a day. What the table does not indicate is the standard deviation for that mean. The mean for the United States is about two-thirds of the number for Belgium, but Semantic Mantis's data from the CDC shows that there is a large standard deviation here. That is, lots of people have little to no alcohol in a given week, while a smaller number of people have several drinks each day. We would need more evidence to know whether alcohol consumption is more or less universal among adults in Belgium, at a rate of a drink or two per day, or whether daily consumption varies widely among specific social subgroups, perhaps defined by age, ethnicity, income, education, or whatever. Marco polo (talk) 14:12, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A 2008 survey found that 22% of Belgians claim to never drink alcohol while 14% claim to drink alcohol daily.[3] But they were not on the extremes of European results for either answer. Rmhermen (talk) 14:15, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, about 7% of their study group and 9% of the drinkers in it drink daily. Or about 675,100 Ontarians. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:55, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I am late to this discussion, but I think it is important to define what it means to "drink alcohol." From personal experience... When I was in Norway, the people I was with drank beer at each meal. However, they did not consider it "drinking alcohol" because the beer was less than 2% alcohol. They got beer from the local brewery (Makol if I remember correctly) which was 5% alcohol. Drinking that was drinking alcohol. Similarly, when I was in Italy, the people I was with had wine with every dinner, but that was not drinking alcohol. They lived in the Asti region and wine was everywhere, but it has nearly no alcohol in it. The "celebration wine" did have alcohol (between 8 and 10%) and that was considered "drinking alcohol." Again, in Kyoto, the people I was with did a shot of rice wine at the end of dinner each night, but it was highly diluted. It was more just hot water and less alcohol. On Sunday night, they got out the real wine and got drunk. That was drinking alcohol. So, from three completely different environments, I noticed that what people consider to be "drinking alcohol" can be different than "drinking a liquid that contains alcohol." Therefore, self-identification of alcohol consumption can have a lot of bias. 209.149.114.204 (talk) 19:13, 14 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

As for Ontario, drinking beer under 5% is still more something one reads about in the paper than makes a habit of. Safe to assume the study I linked meant at least one (maybe two) daily standard serving. InedibleHulk (talk) 19:43, 14 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Some points:

1) I believe people who drink regularly develop a tolerance for alcohol, so that an equal amount has less effect on them.

2) Drinking a more-or-less constant amount each day but staying sober is less damaging than binges, where one gets seriously "drunk", perhaps passing out.

3) A low enough level of alcohol consumption actually has some health benefits.

4) The body does possess the ability to process a small amount of (grain) alcohol before it does damage, but how much people can process varies due to genetics, which in turn differs by ethnic group. In other words, some ethnic groups can better handle alcohol than others. The general tendency is that those ethnic groups who have been consuming alcohol for a long time have developed better ways to process it internally. StuRat (talk) 04:16, 15 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Can we name this flag please?

I saw a flag from the bus the other day which I had never seen before and can't recognize at all.Didn't have time to take a pic,but that's [4] a fairly good rendering of it. It's not a local flag or of any group I can think of. Any ideas? Lemon martini (talk) 21:37, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Can we assume from your use of the phrase "bits and bobs" on your userpage that you are located somewhere in the UK? It might help to have an even more precise location such as a city name. Was it part of an advertisement? Dismas|^(talk) 21:47, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia Commons' 'flag by colour' tool reveals that it is the flag of the Berber people. AlexTiefling (talk) 22:09, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

[ec] This is the flag of Berberism, a North African nationalist movement. Tevildo (talk) 22:10, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm in Exeter,UK. It was on a flagpole in someone's garden. Thanks for identifying it-it seems a rather unusual one to pop up in a Devon village,but there we are. Incidentally,the link is producing a error message-there's a bad title apparently... Lemon martini (talk) 22:58, 13 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. AlexTiefling (talk) 07:00, 14 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]