 "It looks like moderate drinking has been increasing, heavy drinking is down a little bit, and total alcohol consumption is down a little bit," said lead researcher Dr. R. Curtis Ellison, a professor of medicine and public health at Boston University School of Medicine.
For the study, Ellison and his team collected data on 8,600 people who had taken part in the well-known Framingham Heart Study. People in the initial arm of the study were born before 1900 up until 1959. Those from the initial enrollment group as well as their children were interviewed every four years from 1948 to 2003 about their alcohol consumption.
Since the Framingham study consisted primarily of white, middle-class individuals from Massachusetts, the Study tends to reflect trends within the country among middle-class, white Americans.
The researchers found that, "People drank about a third more back in the '50s and '60s than they did in the '70s up to 2004," Ellison said.
Women consistently drank less than men, the study found. Heavy drinking dropped with age for men but fell less markedly for women. By their mid-70s, men were drinking half the beer they'd drunk in their mid-30s, and the decline among women was similar.
There's been a gradual decrease in the average amount of alcohol people drink. For instance, alcohol consumption among men has gone from about 2.5 drinks a day to 1.5 drinks a day, Ellison said.
"At the same time, there's been a decrease in beer and an increase in wine consumption among people. But the average intake has decreased with the average intake of liquor remaining pretty much the same, he added.
Despite the decline in alcohol consumption, the risk of alcohol dependence did not show a corresponding decrease, the study also found.
"We don't know why alcohol consumption has gone down," Ellison said. "The data are very clear that light to moderate drinking, without binge drinking, is generally good for health, whereas a larger amount of binge drinking is bad. It looks like, in this population, it's going in the right direction."
The study findings were published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
David L. Katz, director of the Yale University School of Medicine Prevention Research Center, noted that during "recent decades, the messages about alcohol have increasingly emphasized the potential to derive both pleasure and health benefits from wine, provided the dose is prudent."
However the observation by the researchers that Americans are drinking less beer and more wine, with consumption of hard liquor remaining same seems to be at variance with the recent Gallup poll.
Gallup's annual consumption habits poll, conducted July 10-13, indicates 42 percent of those polled chose beer first. Those going for wine amounted for 31 percent and liquor was 23 percent.
Beer continues to represent the largest segment in the alcohol beverage category in volume and dollar sales, accounting for 56 percent of all alcohol beverage servings, according to the Gallup poll.
Wine had narrowed the gap in recent years, even displacing beer as the most favourite drink in 2005. |