Facts and Fiction About Alcohol

A sizable minority of imbibers have no clue about the potency of the festive holiday drinks they have been consuming the past few weeks.

“Cocktails look festive and harmless, but their alcohol content doesn’t magically drop because it’s the holidays,” pointed out Brian Chase with the personal injury law firm, Bisnar Chase that recently released a national survey of 2,002 adults (21+) on their holiday drinking habits.

The survey found that 38 percent of respondents think that holiday drinks including eggnog, mulled wine, and hot toddies have the same alcoholic content as low-alcohol beer. Regarding eggnog cocktails, a staggering 61 percent believed the drink which is spiked with whisky, brandy or rum, has the same alcoholic content as light beer, which typically has alcoholic content of only three to four percent. In contrast, a spiked egg nog cocktail could contain up to 20 percent alcohol depending on the size of the cocktail and the proof of the spirits used.

Among the other alarming conclusions: 46 percent believe warm drinks such as an Irish hot toddy (i.e. whiskey, water, lemon and honey), counted as low-alcohol, and when faced with a menu item called Santa’s Milkshake, almost half (48 percent) would assume it’s alcohol-free.

Individual recipes aside, the number of drinks consumed matters even more.

Over 30 years ago, the term “binge drinking,”–usually defined as four drinks for women or five drinks for men in under two hours–entered the popular vernacular. The term originated in 1993 when Henry Wechsler, a psychologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health served as the principal investigator of the College Alcohol Study. He tracked drinking patterns among 17,000 college students across 140 college campuses and found almost half of the respondents to the survey acknowledged they engaged in binge drinking on occasion and nearly one in five (19 percent) said they engaged in the behavior frequently.

In 2022, a new survey from the Institute for Social Research University of Michigan a found a new phenomenon that it called “high-intensity drinking–consuming eight or more drinks in a row for women and 10 or more drinks in a row for men.

The report noted that a person who consumes five drinks over a few hours may or may not show signs of intoxication, depending on factors including body composition, food and water intake, and tolerance. But a person who consumes ten drinks over the same time period is at high risk for alcohol poisoning and other negative outcomes. “The more alcohol a person drinks, the more likely they are to experience negative consequences such as hangovers, injuries and regretted sexual encounters,” the report concluded.

The heavier dosage involved with high intensity drinking “significantly increases the risk of injuries, overdose, and deaths” among grossly intoxicated drinkers, warns George F. Kobb, the current director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Stanford University addiction expert Dr. Keith Humphreys describes high-intensity drinkers as a danger to themselves and others, sometimes ending up in an Emergency Room –with absolutely no idea how they got there.

While five drinks are risky, it’s not the same as 10, says Dr. Humphreys. “The dose,” he concludes, “makes the poison.”

Much of the research on binge and high intensity drinking focused on college students or adults in their 20s and the short term consequences of the behavior. The University of Michigan urged further studies should examine the long term impact of the behavior in later stage adult life and the impact of heavy drinking on their children.