Are they men or women drinking more?

There have always been differences in drinking habits between men and women worldwide, both in taste preferences and quantity. This is not great news for women. As a general rule, men outpace women in terms of how often and how much they drink.

A recent study has found a conundrum that spells bad news for women: women are drinking more and men are drinking less.

NIH: Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research: Converging Patterns of Alcohol Use and Related Outcomes Among Females and Males in the United States, 2002 to 2012.

“We found that over that period of time, differences in measures such as current drinking, number of drinking days per month, reaching criteria for an alcohol use disorder, and driving under the influence of alcohol in the past year, all narrowed for females and males”, says Dr. White. Over this period, the number of females who reported having at least a drink in the last month rose from 45 percent to 48 percent, while the number of men slightly decreased to 56 percent. On average, a USA male adult drinks 18 liters of alcohol every year, while a woman drinks 7.8 liters on an annual basis.

The same number of college kids admitted to binge drinking.

“Women physically can not keep up with men, even if they are the same weight”, Glaser says. “The prevalence of combining alcohol with marijuana during the last drinking occasion among 18- to 25-year-old male drinkers increased from 15 percent to 19 percent”, White said. Koob also said this change in women’s drinking habit is suggesting they are at greater risk than men to develop drinking-related health issues.

The NIAAA study used data from the yearly National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which involves around 70,000 people. The drinking gap now stands at 7.8 percentage points.

The study’s authors do not give any reasons for the closing of the gender drinking gap which “do not appear to be easily explained by recent trends in employment, pregnancy, or marital status, as their analyses controlled for these variables”.

Heavy drinking takes a big toll and women may not want to catch up to men in this particular area, the researchers noted. But binge drinking among college students of the same age group did not change between 2002 and 2012.

Furthermore, men are more likely to engage in unsafe drinking behaviors such as combining alcohol with other substances.

Aaron White, who led the study, said there’s also a prevalence in young men and women who drank alcohol and smoked marijuana at the same time during the study.