Midlife drinkers
How embarrassing are you?
We all know drinking to excess is bad for us. And yet still we cling to that story we read once somewhere, can’t remember where – hang on, let me Google it – about those people in Greece, or was it Spain, who live to be 105 on a diet of red wine, filterless fags, the odd ripe tomato and glug of olive oil. This is known as the School of It Didn’t Do Them Any Harm denial.
Despite years of public health advice telling us to moderate our alcohol intake, many of us continue to believe “they” surely can’t mean “us”, as we uncork that bottle, and oops, half of it’s gone before we even get dinner on the table.
A study published in the journal BMC Public Health looked into middle-aged people’s attitudes to drinking, and found that, while many of us might shrug off worries about the long-term health consequences of drinking, the fate we feared most was looking a fool. According to the study’s participants, drinking becomes unacceptable when people display signs of having gone too far: slurred speech, tottering about, visibly being hungover. No one loves a sloppy drunk.
Perhaps contrary to public perception, British people in their forties, fifties and sixties now drink more than those aged 18 to 24. We can banish any thoughts that getting bladdered gives us a youthful air of devil-may-care insouciance. So if totting up the alcohol units isn’t convincing us to change, perhaps counting the Idiot Units might just reach the parts other public health advice cannot reach?