At wine o’clock we forget how to be moderate drinkers
We’re so civilised when we choose wine at home over falling out of the pub, but it all causes brain damage, writes Sarah Caden
AFRIEND recently went out with a gang of her oldest female friends and was shocked to discover that some had cut back on their drinking. They still enjoyed what we’d call a “good” night out, but they had curtailed the tipping away, the midweek at-home drinking, the drip-drip of wine o’clock.
“I was shocked,” said my friend, sadly. She’s not what you’d call a big drinker; but neither were they. And she felt bothered that they were cutting back further.
Most alcohol-drinking women of my age can relate. We’ve read all the articles that tell us that a giant Celtic Tiger-sized balloon glass of nightly wine is not good for us. And that it still counts as boozing. And that it is an inappropriate reward for getting through the day.
We get it, rationally, but we opt to dismiss it and persist anyway, fundamentally believing that it’s only really drinking or dangerous if you’re locked out of your mind.
Last week, results were published of a 30-year study of the effects of alcohol on the brain, conducted by University of London and Oxford University. That alcohol consumption has an effect on the brain should come as no surprise. We’re not stupid. But we are selective.
The reason these results caused a stir is that they showed that even moderate drinking has a negative effect. “Moderate”, a world beloved by those who gave up eighthour nights out, relocated their drinking to the sofa and regarded themselves as reformed.
According to Drinkaware, the Department of Health/ HSE suggest that “low-risk alcohol guidelines” are 11 standard drinks spread out over a week for a woman and 17 standard drinks for a man. Two alcohol-free days per week were recommended for both sexes.
That sounds manageable, right? Even when we half accept that a pint of beer or a home-poured glass of wine exceed a ‘standard’ drink.
We know we’re ever so slightly pushing our luck, but how bad?
It would seem that we’re more than slightly pushing it, though, even with that “lowrisk” behaviour.
Last week’s study shows that moderate drinking can cause brain damage over time. I know what you’re thinking. — “Ah yeah, but what does that mean? It can’t mean what I’m doing.”
What it means is that they found that almost any drinking does damage, if you keep at it. Out of the non-drinkers studied, 35pc showed shrinkage to the right side of the hippocampus, where memory function is located. So, you say, it might get damaged whether I drink or not. Well, yes, maybe. In those who drank 14-21 units per week (that’s about six-nine pints of beer), 65pc showed shrinkage, while 77pc of those who drank 30 or more units per week (approximately 12 pints) displayed damage.
Further, in word-function tests, those who consumed seven-14 units per week performed 14pc worse than those who drank one-two units per week. That’s less than a pint. That falls heavily on the ears of a people who consider “a few pints after work” to be four. Who am I kidding? It means six.
Or it does to my generation, who drank more than our mothers, many of whom didn’t drink at all until they got to the empty-nest stage. Alcohol, in our youth, was a symbol of emancipation, almost. We were educated and earning and electing to have our children later and we wanted to have fun. We were free and we played that out, in part, in how we drank.
We think of it in the past tense, obviously, because now the sum total of drinks we have on a night out or a night in would have amounted to an aperitif when we were going “out-out”.
In our youth, my generation were the textbook Irish binge-drinkers. To our minds, if you’re not falling-down, no-memory-of-getting-home, where’s-my-other-shoe drunk, then that’s not really drinking.
Now we know that bingeing is bad and we don’t want our children doing it, but we’ve no problem with them seeing us reach for the wine every night. Or hearing how we fall upon the wine bottle of an evening like it’s a salve for the stress of the day. Because that’s what women of my age — and I include myself to some extent — are doing.
In many cases, we are 40-something women who have careers and who chose to have children later. A lot of us still have the careers, but also have small children when we don’t have the stamina of our 20s for keeping up with them.
Our partying stopped as late as our childbearing began, and, perhaps, it has been a hard habit to kick. And we women, in a lot of cases, have kicked the blind-drunk bit, but not the habit per se. The wine is nightly, or we do the advised two nights off, or we restrict it to the weekends. We find all kinds of ways to define our drinking as moderate and, until now, our minds felt fuzzily at ease that this was low-risk behaviour.
We told ourselves it was all OK, we were taking the recommended two nights off, or it was only one glass a night, like the French, or we drank only at weekends. And we felt threatened and tormented by any suggestions that this wasn’t low-risk at all, threatened by the friends who cut back further, fearful of how we will assuage our stress if we’re forced into abstinence.
Last week’s report brought words of wise warning, obviously, but to our ears they can sometimes sound like more of a terrible threat. Without the wine, who are we?
‘The sum total of drinks we now have on a night would have amounted to just an aperitif when we were young and going ‘‘out-out”’