The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has conducted a massive survey of American drinking habits and has found that somewhere near 38 million adult Americans consider themselves binge drinkers. In their report, the agency says that binge drinking, which is defined as having four or more drinks for women in a single drinking session, or five or more for men (the difference is because of average body size) hasn’t changed much over the past couple of decades, but reporting and data collection has, resulting in what it believes is an uptick from the 15 percent of American adults that described themselves as binge drinkers back in 2009.
To conduct the study, as reported by LiveScience, the CDC used a team of researchers to randomly call people on their cell phones and then to ask them to take part in the survey. After analyzing the data, the research team found that those that described themselves as binge drinkers reported binging as often as four time a month on average, which would correspond rather neatly with weekends, or more likely Friday nights spent out away from home without worry of having to be at work in the morning. When combined with Happy Hour, it seems the data points to what is rather obvious.
More enlightening, the research also revealed that adult binge drinkers are relatively young, with about 28% of the total in a group of people between the ages of 18 and 24. They also found that men are roughly twice as likely to report being binge drinkers as are women. They also found that older men tend to drink more than all other groups when binging and they do it more often.
All told the research team managed to quiz almost half a million people during the study which ran sometime in 2010 for a period of thirty days.
The team also broke the results down by states and found for example that people who binge drink in Wisconsin tend to drink more than in any other state while the lowest frequency of binge drinking seems to be in New Jersey.
The CDC concluded its report by noting that binge drinking is not nearly as harmless as some might think. While most such drinkers are not considered hard core alcoholics, per se, such frequent bouts of drinking can still cause liver damage and of course lead to thousands of people being killed on the roads every year. They suggest that government at all levels look for ways to reduce binge drinking to help make everyone safer.