How strong is your drink?

New research shows most New Zealanders are confused about how many standard drinks are in their glass.

Results showed most adults couldn’t accurately say how many standard drinks were in most common alcohol beverages and three quarters were unfamiliar with the nation’s recommended healthy drinking guidelines.

Only 17 per cent of respondents got the drink driving limit right, with just 11 per cent able to correctly point out that there is no set number of drinks that made driving safe– a variety of factors impacted whether you were safe to get behind a wheel.

The research was conducted by Fiftyfive5 research agency in November, 2018 and saw about 800 New Zealand adults surveyed.

Jude Walter from Alcohol&me, who commissioned the research, said in 2012 only 75 per cent of people had heard of a standard drink, so things had moved on from there.

Now, it was about people understanding what a standard drink actually was.

‘‘You can’t make smarter choices if you don’t know what that is,’’ Walter said.

She said the survey highlighted there was a real opportunity to educate New Zealand about a standard drink, which was what their interactive programme helped do.

‘‘Put simply, an adult body can only process one standard drink an hour, regardless of your age, size or how much you’ve eaten and there’s no way to speed that up.

‘‘So when you’re drinking a typical 5 per cent bottle of beer or cider at a bar or BBQ, it will take the body 1.3 hours to process the alcohol in that bottle.’’

A lot of people were confused when it came to drinks not in bottles.

Most were guessing a 150ml wine, which was a standard pour in most restaurants, was about 1.1 standard drinks.

It is actually 1.5.

RTDS were even higher as there was 1.8 standard drinks in a 330ml RTD bottle, while a Speight’s beer was one standard drink.

‘‘Not all drinks are born equal but the information on the vessel tells you,’’ Walter said.

‘‘It’s making sure people have access to easy to understand information to make smarter drinking choices.’’

Through the Alcohol & me programme Walter the top three reasons people gave for not drinking was they didn’t want to get drunk, health reasons and the affect of alcohol.

However, she said these were all things that could be avoided if people understand what was in what they were drinking.

‘‘There are ways to drink that don’t result in getting drunk.’’

More than 27,000 people had been through the programme since it launched.

Walter said they were pleased as they wanted to get this information out to New Zealanders.