as someone who used to drink daily but stopped, I found that I dramatically overestimated how much the average USian drinks. when you're surrounded by drinkers it's an easy mistake to make.
Yeah it was surprising but this is from NIH, they didn't have a stat for daily drinkers so I took the most extreme.
According to the 2022 NSDUH, 16.0 million adults ages 18 and older reported heavy alcohol use in the past month (see glossary for definition of heavy alcohol use)
Heavy alcohol use (or heavy drinking):
NIAAA defines heavy alcohol use as follows:
For men, consuming five or more drinks on any day or 15 or more per week
For women, consuming four or more drinks on any day or 8 or more per week
You have no idea what real alcohol dependance can look like. 74/Week is a run of the mill alcoholic. Many drink double that for years and even decades before their liver forces them to stop or die.
Yea, that's what I thought, too. When OP posted that figure, I thought, that's like 10 beers a day... I mean, yes that's a lot, but even I might have achieved that during the peak of my irresponsible drinking era. When I think "actual alcoholic" I imagine about 3X that number.
The other issue here is the term tolerance. There's the "I have a high tolerance" sentiment from people who think that means they can drink a couple more drinks than their friends and not pass out verses real tolerance in the medical sense of the term. Tolerance in the medical sense is that you have submerged your central nervous system in a depressant for so long that it has effectively "Overclocked" itself to compensate. It now runs faster and hotter in order to overcome the constant presence of something trying to slow it down. That's why people with real tolerance sweat profusely, have uncontrollable shaking and potentially seizures and hallucinations when the CNS depressant is removed from their system. Their nervous system has adjusted to only function normally with the depressant in their system and functions extremely abnormally without it.
Seems about right to me, if not high. Keep in mind that this isn't the number of Americans that consume alcohol, but the number of Americans that consume alcohol on a daily basis. People that drink on the weekends, or a few times a week after work, don't qualify. 1 in 20 seems a bit high to me, but within the ballpark.
This thread is fascinating for highlighting that what seems normal to one person seems rare to another.
I'm not sure I know a single "daily drinker". Even the people who had reputations as being heavy drinkers I don't think drank every day. Drinking daily sounds like something someone in recovery would talk about as the final stage of their spiral towards rock bottom before they went to rehab, not something I'd expect 1 in 20 people to be doing.
But maybe I'm underestimating how many people have one glass of wine with dinner or one beer after work.
Before becoming a techie I did construction work and nearly every person drank beer after (and often during) work. It was a way to alleviate the pain from hard manual labor.
I think there's a lot of people that drink a glass of wine at dinner maybe? They're not by any means alcoholics but would be included in that 5%, which seems expected I guess.