Holy shit. It is way too easy, living in Wisconsin, to normalize alcohol use disorder. Damn. So many people in my life meet the definition of “heavy social drinker”. I’m not far off. I really need to dry out.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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"Drink Wisconsinbly"
Grew up in the Maritimes in Canada and that sort of culture was there for me, too. I definitely had some bad alcohol habits in my early to mid 20s. At one point, I could go through a 1.5 litre of wine solo, no problem.
I've dried out somewhat. Still a few drinks a week, but moderation is good (and cheaper)
I think a better headline would be something like "Limits of alcohol tolerance." After the 4-5 drink-equivalent drink, the heavy drinkers did well on the cognitive test even though they didn't do any better than the light drinkers at the manual dexterity test. It looks like tolerance does affect certain faculties, up to a point.
They also didn't test the light drinkers at the 7-8 drink dose, so I'm not sure we can draw any conclusions there. The heavy drinkers did badly, but they still might have out-performed light drinkers. (If you gave me seven drinks in half an hour, I don't think I'd be able to read the test.)
Still blows my mind that alcohol is so culturally normalized. And that's as a light drinker myself. The amount of damage it causes is so disproportionate to how it's handled and advertised.