alt Hacker News>It turns out that two drinks per day, which might be considered ‘moderate’ from a social standpoint, is associated with a substantially elevated risk of a premature death caused by alcohol, they explain.
Two drinks sounds moderate to me. Averaging two drinks a day does not.
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Alcohol education classes promote (or used to promote…I had to attend one a couple of decades ago in college), the 1-2-3 system.
Not more than 1 unit an hour, don’t average more than 2 units a day over a week, and never exceed 3 units a day.
The caveat here is that a unit is much less than a regular serving size. A pint of beer is usually closer to 2 units.
So the recommendation was to not average more than a pint of beer a day, and to never drink more than about 1.5 pints in a day.
It’s much more stringent than people imagine.
2 drinks a day is approaching Mad Men levels of alcohol consumption.
NIH would define this as "heavy alcohol use". According to their estimates, only 5.5% of adults did this in the past month:
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-to...
(Search for "Prevalence of Past-Month Heavy Alcohol Use")
Some interesting stats in there. Like only 85% of adults have drank ever in their lifetime.