Are your drinking habits healthy or harmful?
My recent post on moderate drinking and breast cancer risk spurred a lot of comments. So I thought you might also be interested in a new initiative from the National Institutes of Health called Rethinking Drinking. The goal is to help people assess the risks and/or benefits of their drinking habits.
I think some people will be suprised to see how low the threshold for "low-risk" drinking is, especially when you consider the size of a "standard" drink is just 1.5 ounces of hard liquor. The newly (or once again) popular martini drinks usually contain the equivalent of 2 to 4 servings of alcohol.
Our social norms make it completely unremarkable to have a drink before dinner and a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. This alone would put you in the high risk category. If you're motivated by this to make a change, the site offers tools and ideas for cutting back your alcohol consumption.
What do you think? Is this too heavy-handed an approach? Are we American's showing our latent puritanism here? Are the risks of moderate drinking being overstated?
I will say that, for those who are motivated to make a change in their drinking habits, the tools and strategies on this site are very well designed. They are consistent with the proven approach developed by James Prochaska and outlined in his excellent book Changing for Good.
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Posted by: Mike Cheliak | May 10, 2009 11:49:23 AM
Fantastic post. There is a lot of people as mentioned in the previous comments who don't associate their drinking habits with poor nutritional choices. While I enjoy a glass of wine or a beer on a hot summer day, I avoid multiple drinks and consecutive day drinking as it can easily train wreck your nutrition very quickly!
Posted by: Sue | Apr 3, 2009 6:20:54 PM
With so much attention given to healthy foods, I think people totally forget (maybe ignore)that alcohol isn't a healthy food. It is a drug. Where a person might be health conscious, they should also be addiction conscoius. Alcoholism is a huge problem in this country as well as obesity. We have to eat to survive. We don't have to drink alcohol to survive. On the contrary, if you don't drink any alcohol, you won't become addicted to it.
Posted by: Disa Marnesdottr | Mar 11, 2009 1:58:00 PM
Thanks for posting this. There was a lot of self-justification in the comments on your previous post. Certainly, a small amount of red wine can be heart-healthy, but the quantities discussed are not.
An additional thing to consider is that one five ounce serving of red wine has a whopping 125 calories. Compare that to five ounces of Classic Coke, which has 55 calories. It has always been frustrating for me to listen to friends and family complain about their inability to lose weight. They never consider giving up their two or three glasses of red wine with dinner.
