We need to have easily understood ways of defining standard drinks.
Sometimes John has a couple of drinks in the evening. Sometimes he has nothing alcoholic at all. Once a week, though, he drinks a full bottle of wine.
Asked if he was a binge drinker, John would almost certainly say he was not. Binge drinkers get out of their heads and totter around Temple Bar, or your local equivalent, at three o’clock in the morning.
Yet it appears that John does, officially, binge-drink once a week and he is, therefore, a binge drinker.
But is it, I wonder, helpful to put John into the same category as people who roar their way through pubs and nightclubs for hours on end and finish up God knows where and in God knows what state?
And if you think drinking a full bottle of wine is overdoing it, what about having three pints of beer over an evening? That, I’m afraid, is binging also because that’s the equivalent of six “standard” drinks.
When The Irish Times did an online survey in April (Did you drink too much last week? Yes, most of you did, 22nd April), it noted that having six or more “standard” drinks in one sitting is considered binge drinking by the HSE.
Source: Padraig O’Morain, The Irish Times, 28/07/15
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