Can Brits live without Alcohol?

One has to wonder

OP- Maybe that's why their food is so HORRIBLE.

Yes. My ex not only drank everyday , but also forced me to drink with him.

Some of them did in World War 2, six years of war for them.

Stay Calm! Carry On!

I kind of envy their laissez-faire approach to drinking. Americans are drunks too but we punish ourselves for it.

I don't mind the drinking, it's the violence and other shit that comes along with it that I hate.

Well, the fact that there is a pub on most street corners might have something to do with it.

I stopped drinking because it made me crave a line or two of coke. I love the act of drinking but I hate being drunk, so I would seek out coke after a certain point in my buzz. I would stay up too late and be hungover for days. Yuck. It became way more trouble than it was worth.

We know Wendy can’t!

[quote] Americans are drunks too

There are important differences

Americans drink the equivalent of 470 pints of mild beer annually. The average British drinker consumes 1,100 pints of beer in a year.

The USA has one of the lowest rates of drinking in the developed world. According to the WHO, the average American drinks just around 31 glasses of wine. When you compare this figure with the rest of Europe, and the UK, you realize that there’s a significant difference. The average British drinker consumes roughly 73 glasses of wine!

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the average American drinks almost 800ml less pure alcohol than the average British drinker. According to experts, baby boomers were one of the main causes for the higher rates of drinking. The United States consumes less pure alcohol per person in a year than countries like France, Austria, Russia, and Germany too.

The United Kingdom has the highest proportion of heavy episode drinkers at 33.4%. The United States had 24.5%.

Americans spend about 1 percent of their gross annual income on alcohol ($565 a year). In the UK, this figure was £868. In the United States, the average household spends around $5,650 in a decade. This translates to roughly $11 in a week. In most American cities, $11 is the cost of a cocktail. On a weekly basis, the average British household spends £16.7 on alcohol drinks. This is around 3% of the average household budget in the UK. In fact, this is more than the amount people spend on buying fish and meat from stores in a year!

Yes. I rarely drink. One or two, tops, on a special occasion. Many others I know are the same.

That’s not to say binge drinking is not endemic in our culture. It’s historic. The Chinese, for instance, didn’t adopt glass until fairly late and instead developed a tea drinking culture. Genetic studies have shown descendants of cultures such as these have lower thresholds in terms of what will make them drunk.

Meanwhile, historically, the British avoided water (it normally contained pathogens that caused various diseases) and beer was the safer option. Great halls - and the sort of live hard, die hard - Anglo Saxon / Celtic / Viking warrior mentality flourished. We never had the temperance movement in any impactful sense and we’ve long been more secular. Pubs were the community meeting spaces, not churches. They’ve always been more social affairs than lone drinking in US bars. It lives on in student culture and every town centre, particularly at weekends. It’s not like the French culture of wine with meals - it’s a lot of spirits and beer.

It’s a problem though. In the violence it causes and the pressure it puts on our health service. There’s been numerous campaigns to “drink responsibly” and nominal efforts to increase taxes on alcohol. But it’s such an established “culture” to unpick. And the fact is, you can go to any shop or supermarket and buy a lot of booze for not very much. We also have a lower age limit (18) and a LOT of kids start a lot younger than that.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

One in every five young Brits has fatty liver disease and one in 40 has lover scarring.

I think it's a little weird that Brits are so proud of their nationwide drinking habit and seem to reject alcohol addiction as a problem altogether. Intoxication and disease as a national value just seems really bizarre to me.

However, I do understand that pubs are a different aspect of their culture than anything we have in the U.S. I envy the kind of community both British and Irish people have in their pubs. I wish I had that in my life, but if I did, I'd be drinking a lot more tea or something else because I don't like anything about being drunk on alcohol. It makes me physically ill now, in part due to an allergic disorder I have.

I think Brits' relationship with alcohol overall is something I can't understand and honestly find totally off putting. I have been around a lot of different kinds of drunks, from giggly ones to angry ones to insistent chatty ones to mean ones, and I can't handle the loud and aggressive ones. I did a summer abroad at Cambridge 20 years ago, and it seemed like everyone in town had Jeckyll/Hyde drinking personalities, being pleasant and civilized during the day and then being loud, belligerent drunks pissing and screaming in the streets at night. Then I went to Amsterdam a few years back and heard a crowd of loud people coming down the street one night and was taken in my mind back to Cambridge and, sure enough, the loud drunks had English accents as they approached. And then another group, and then another group on a boat in the canals and then another. Americans act like that on spring break in Mexico, I guess, but Brits seem to have an on/off switch for behaving obnoxiously and the switch is alcohol.

And this bothers you why, exactly, OP?

R11 has the measure of it.

Further, we British are unfortunately a socially and sexually inhibited people, therefore social lubricant is necessary for us, or we’d have died out long ago.

I like it when drunk Brit yobs take their fat, uncut cocks out to piss and get recorded and the clips get shared on ThisVid.

That's probably one of very few good things that comes out of this alcohol addiction epidemic.

Can Americans live without burgers, fries and pizza 4 times a week?

A former coworker of mine is married to an English guy. She lived over there for five or six years and then they moved here. He's very heavy—how one would imagine an average obese American—and he didn't go to college and worked in pubs all his life. Coming here, he didn't have many opportunities because at least in the DC area, most jobs expect some college education. For some reason, bars and restaurants weren't apt to hire him (I guess pubs operate differently somehow?) and he ended up managing a large alcohol store, which I guess is his aptitude. His wife is concerned about his life being centered around alcohol because separated from pubs, where the focus was community, alcohol alone is all that's left of the culture and profession.

We drink to spite the racists!!

R16 I rarely eat burgers!

I found when I went to France that fries are more ubiquitous there than in the US. But I do love fries and eat them fairly regularly.

I've gone pizza free for about three months and it is HARD.

What we Americans can't live without, generally speaking, is obscene amounts of coffee. I never knew until I went to Europe that the quantity of coffee we drink is unusual, but those little demitasses used throughout Europe are almost offensively small for those of us used to drinking...way too much coffee.

If you were living on grey, racist Brexit Island, you'd be drinking every fucking day too.

British, and can confirm, there’s a huge problem with alcohol in the country. A lot of people never grow out of the uni/college binge drinking “phase”. It’s fine when you’re 20, but not a good look into your 40’s, 50’s, 60’s…

R20 When I was at Cambridge, a local guy lectured me on how I come from a racist country (US), whereas in Britain everyone is just British, not distinguished by their appearance or where they come from. "Except the Pakis," he said. "We hate the Pakis."

He also insisted that the country is an island and NOT Europe.

On a BA flight from Bangkok to Sydney, the Brits started drinking beer before the flight took off, kept at it at a constant pace for the duration of the flight. I was fucking amazed that when we landed in Sydney 9 hours later that they were able to walk off the plane upright, unaided and none the worse for wear.

I got yelled at in another thread for calling something Orwellian that he did write about but which isn't the standard association with Orwell...so here I go again. Orwell was a Brit and a big part of Nineteen Eighty-Four was the idea that Big Brother drugged/dumbed down the general population with liquor (Victory gin in particular) as a means of keeping them disengaged and allowing them to do their drone work.

Do elite Brits drink as much as the average Brit does? Do they regularly get trashed, loud and obnoxious, or is that behavior reserved for the working and middle classes?

British boomers are huge drinkers. My mum drinks a LOT of wine, and so do her friends. Before she retired she used to drink every night. My dad isn’t a huge drinker but he does go to the pub once a week.

I worked with a British girl many years ago who told me alcohol only exists in the US because people buy into the idea; everywhere else, drinking is part of the cultures that go back to the earliest days of man and it's not a disease, just a natural part of life.

[quote]Do elite Brits drink as much as the average Brit does?

We would venture rather more.

when oi was likkle Gaffah always sed to me “it’s noice to ave a few after a match son” sow that’s whot oi do as well💭

R28 It's "ahs weww," not "as well."

I have wine sometimes with meals if we have company at the weekend. My husband doesn’t drink at all.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sixty percent of U.S. adults currently report drinking alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer, marking a decrease from 65% in 2019 when the measure was last tracked. This puts current alcohol consumption on the low end of the range Gallup has recorded over the past two decades, with the percentage imbibing as high as 67% in 2010.

R30 Do you think the reputation of British people as heavy drinkers is deserved or no?

A friend moved there about 4 years ago and when I went to visit, them and stayed at their apartment, I have to say. The water in London, tap water, is horrible. It tastes nasty. So maybe that's why they have always been big drinkers.

Brits invented "Sober October" so apparently so

R33 London was a literal (I'm using the term correctly in this case.) cess pool for centuries. People didn't avoid water because of the poor taste of tap water but because it was contaminated with human waste and disease.

Historically, Brits spent every evening "down the pub" so as to keep warmer than they could in their homes. Most Brits didn't have central heating until the 1970s.

I remember drinking sherry at 10:30 AM with some of my professors at university, then getting looped at a pub a couple of hours later (well before I was 21). This was in the mid-70s.

[quote] being pleasant and civilized during the day and then being loud, belligerent drunks pissing and screaming

There's your difference. Americans are happy to go around being loud, belligerent, and screaming while stone cold sober. They don't need the crutch of drunkeness.

R36 I was 20 when I did my study abroad in England. I flew Virgin Atlantic and a flight attendant asked what I wanted to drink. I had never had alcohol and I had never flown alone before and was very nervous, so I would not have considered having my first drink there and potentially freaking out; I had no idea what alcohol effects felt like at the time. I ordered a Coke or whatever and the flight attendant said, "alcohol drinks are free on international flights!" I said no thank you and she said "You don't have to be 21 to drink in the UK!" I said no thanks and I swear she looked at me like I was totally insane.

R37 Only Karens and he-Karens.

[quote]Do elite Brits drink as much as the average Brit does?

The former Duke of Devonshire was a reformed alcoholic. Francis Bacon was a high-functioning alcoholic, as was Kingsley Amis. Harold Pinter was a heavy drinker, as was his playwright friend Simon Gray, who had to stop or die. Actors Richard Burton, Robert Stephens, John Hurt and Oliver Reed were heavy drinkers, as was satirist Peter Cook. Martin Amis's recent memoir 'Inside Story' is steeped in drink, as well it might be given his close friendship with Christopher Hitchens, another high-functioning alcoholic.

These examples off the top of my head suggest that the answer to the question quoted is yes, at least as much.

More than 25% of UK pubs have closed since 2001 (over13,000) and still declining.

If you are looking for one on every corner you'd be disappointed.

R32, I think it depends on how you were introduced to alcohol. My parents had a drink at Christmas and Hogmanay, and didn’t touch it at any other time. I remember having wine diluted with lemonade when I was young, only on special occasions, and I think it made alcohol less of a mystery. I know people who grew up in situations where every adult drank to excess on a daily basis. Thankfully that was not something I experienced.

One thing that is clear is that a lot of people in the UK drink to get drunk, and I mean completely rat-arsed. They go crazy on holiday too. Cheap flights from the UK have made many really nice destinations no go areas because people start drinking before they even get on the plane.

R40 Are those elite Brits from upper class/lorded backgrounds, or are they mostly people from common backgrounds who became wealthy through notoriety?

Visiting London I was fascinated by the crowds spilling out of pubs starting every afternoon.

You want to talk about drinking.. The Irish take the cake. I was at the Airport in Dublin and this guy just walks up to me a complete stranger drunk off his ass rattling off nonsense. I simply walked away politely but secretly mortified.

R45 That happens to me once a month here in DC.

More likely drugs in dC

Hunny, Winston Churchill was drunk most of the time. He ran the country and the war smashed out of his mind. He consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol every single day. ...starting in the morning...or what he called morning. He wasn't an early riser. We're talking fine cognac, champagne, and whiskey as well as his brandy and cigars.

Must be the weather.

I'm mostly British by heritage but I definitely inherited the Puritan gene from my colonist ancestors. I've been drunk enough to get sick a few times, and as with any other sickness, that was enough to make me not want to get drunk like that again. A bird eats a poisoned berry and survives and that bird avoids those berries from then on. Meanwhile, the Brits make a pie of them. I don't get it.

The same does go for drunk white girl culture in the US, though. I have known so many affable white women who are always sweet—except when drinking. They turn aggressive, mean, enraged, and then they throw up all over the place and have to be escorted home. Then they turn up giggling the next day and say "I had the best time!!"

[quote] Can Brits live without Alcohol?

Miserable climate, bad food, worshipping the Royal family - you’d be an alkie too, OP.

I'm mostly familiar with the UK from British TV shows, but it certainly does seem like there's a lot of drinking going on. It seems like in every episode of most dramas there's at least one scene in a pub or a bar, or people are drinking in the office or at home every day. And it also seems as though they make use of alternate forms of transportation instead of driving because of strict drunk driving laws. You see people walking, taking cabs or Ubers, or public transportation much more frequently.

R52 Most pubs/restaurants in the City Centres don't have available car parking close by and you can't park on the street as most are deemed 'tow zones'.

R43 Ask the Queen after she finishes her lunchtime martini.

Down the pub all seems to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.

R41 as a Brit who’s lived in England almost all my life, I’ve observed that drinking culture is slowly giving way to continental coffee-shop culture. The current generation of younger people (under age 30/25) in particular haven’t the predilection for binge-drinking

Not to say that Anglo-Saxon-Celts will ever give up boozing completely. As someone said upthread, we probably can’t at this point, as it’s entrenched in the genes.

I would say no. It's a huge part of the culture in the UK, and the basis of socialising.

I'm quite an odd-one-out in my family - I'm not tee-total but I've never been 'a drinker' whereas the rest of my family are. In fact I honestly couldn't tell you the last time I had an alcoholic drink - it's probably been a few weeks.

R56 It's cultural, not genetic.

Here's my ethnic background according to my DNA, as of Ancestry's latest update yesterday.

According to the genetic theory, I'd be well on my way to cirrhosis, but I've all but cut alcohol out of my lifestyle because it makes me feel like shit.

I do like white wine and gin a lot but the sick feeling from drinking is a deterrent. I never get drunk anymore.

(I might mention that I did drink heavily in my late 20s and early 30s and then took ayahuasca after setting an intention to stop and immediately afterward lost my interest and started feeling sick immediately when I drink.)

Re: R43, Apart from the Duke they were all self-made luminaries, which is how I know about them.

However the phrase 'Drunk as a Lord' comes to mind. Princess Margaret and The Queen Mother were known to be specially fond of cocktails. And many gentlemen or the aspiring make sure to keep a good cellar, indicating an interest beyond that satisfied by visits to their local hostelry, if such even exists.

The Brits started drinking early, didn't they? And even university students who should know better.

What's surprising about the Brits is that the women drink as much as the men. I can't think of another culture where that's true.

R60 Brits start drinking with friends way before 18, usually more like 13/14.

I used to go to the pub in the lunch break from school (early puberty, very tall, no ID needed).

We can, but why would we?

r17 I am an American 48 years old. I'm 6'3" and 185 when not drinking, and 245 (tops) when drinking. It's insane. I stopped a few months ago and starting to feel normal again, because being fat AND sober sucks. I was drinking 3-4 bottles of wine a day average. Work from home, no problem there. But I act like an angry jerk and get really fat so I can't drink.

If this English guy just loves the culture of booze, and isn't a drunk (like I get to be) I think it's just the weight as a problem. I was drinking like 3 thousand calories of wine a day, and my partner is a great cook and I have no portion control. It's pure empty calories, and depletes you of nutrients, vitamins and minerals. I don't like weed, but if there was booze that had no calories I would still be drinking.

[quote]OP: Like not getting enough salt in their diet, will they die if they go without

Low salt levels are not a problem with the British.

In fact, their collective urine is keeping the seas salinated during a time of escalating climate change.

I love the British attitude toward one more round: “It’d be rude not to.”

Did the false stereotype of well-mannered Brits come from movie propaganda? The average drunk Briton is basically a Game of Thrones character, certainly nothing like what we see in most movies.

I've known Brit men in their 40s who will down up to a DOZEN pints between 6PM and closing at 11PM.

The leaks they take afterwards, up against walls on the way to the bus or Tube, are epic.

[quote]one in 40 has lover scarring

OMG, that must be some rough sex!

[quote]Can Brits live without Alcohol?

Yes, technically speaking, they could

But it would ruin their beautiful teeth

I'm calling Survivingangel on this one

[quote] The average drunk Briton is basically a Game of Thrones character

Pagan Life, lad!

Why do you think we have Constantine and Cromwell and Mother Church a kicking? Cos they wanted to take our ale!

𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝗮𝘀 𝗮 '𝗦𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗰 𝗔𝗹𝗰𝗼𝗵𝗼𝗹 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺,' 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘁𝘀

A new study published in the Medical Journal of Australia, however, casts a shadow on all this booze, saying Bond displayed "severe alcohol use disorder" over the course of six decades and 24 movies. The study authors found that in his entire onscreen career, Bond drank 109 times. His most excessive outing, when he downed six Vespers and raised his blood alcohol level to approximately .36 grams per deciliter in Quantum of Solace, was "enough to kill some people," they noted.

Bond's actions, including binge drinking, driving after drinking, fighting after drinking, having sex after drinking, and operating nuclear machinery after drinking, satisfied more than half of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 criteria for alcohol use disorder.

"There is strong and consistent evidence that James Bond has a chronic alcohol consumption problem at the 'severe' end of the spectrum," the study authors concluded. "He should seek professional help .

Methods

All 14 James Bond books were read by two of the authors. Contemporaneous notes were taken detailing every alcoholic drink taken. Predefined alcohol unit levels were used to calculate consumption. Days when Bond was unable to consume alcohol (such as through incarceration) were noted.

Results

After exclusion of days when Bond was unable to drink, his weekly alcohol consumption was 92 units a week, over four times the recommended amount. His maximum daily consumption was 49.8 units. He had only 12.5 alcohol free days out of 87.5 days on which he was able to drink.

Conclusions

James Bond’s level of alcohol intake puts him at high risk of multiple alcohol related diseases and an early death. The level of functioning as displayed in the books is inconsistent with the physical, mental, and indeed sexual functioning expected from someone drinking this much alcohol. We advise an immediate referral for further assessment and treatment, a reduction in alcohol consumption to safe levels, and suspect that the famous catchphrase “shaken, not stirred” could be because of alcohol induced tremor affecting his hands.

Ugh, the puritans are here again for the monthly rant about alcohol. “Bore off” as the Brits say.

Congratulations. R58! You are the most British Brit I have ever known about.

I was raised to believe I was 25% Scottish. My DNA showed I was more Irish, English and Swedish than Scottish. I know Ancestry analyzes gene pools from centuries before, Now I have questions which cannot be answered; my "Scottish" relatives have all died.

The US has 2.6 alcohol related deaths per 100,000 people, the UK has 1.4 (and a longer life expectancy in general).

I wonder who has the problem?

What does alcohol related deaths mean? Does that included car accidents?

R77 I presume they are calculated using the same parameters, not much point compiling them otherwise?

The UK doesn't even have the highest rate in Northern Europe.

That belongs to Finland at 7.22 per 100,000.

Yes but how do they determine alcohol related? I expect there are many more alcohol related car deaths in the US than in the UK. Not all things and factors are equal.

R80 It's per 100,000 to allow for differences in population size.

If alcohol is listed as a contributing factor to their demise it is recorded as such.

Many younger brits under 25 are increasingly teetotal.

Pubs are definitely part of the culture in the UK. One of the things that surprised me, and now I don't know why I was surprised, is that whole families went to the pub to drink together. My American family was rather conservative about such things. We'd have wine with dinner, or a Happy New Year toast, but even after we turned 21, my father never thought it was appropriate to hang out in a bar and drink with his two sons. But in the UK, if your kid is legal, you go together to the pub for a pint and it's no big deal.

Still not answered: what is an alcohol related death?

Is it confined to cirrhosis of the liver? Other medical conditions? Does it include drunk Uncle Harry who fell down the stairs while drunk? Does it include drunk drivers? Does it include victims of drunk drivers? Does it include people killed during an alcohol fueled argument?

Why is this so hard to answer? It is not about the numbers, it is about how they define alcohol related deaths.

There are behaviors that would be more prevalent in the US than in the UK, e.g., there is less of an acceptance of drunk driving in the UK. They don't have guns so drunken husbands don't shoot their wives though they could strangle them. Does the fact the UK has national health insurance with preventive care affect stats?

R83 what bit of [BOLD] "If alcohol is listed as a contributing factor to their demise it is recorded as such." [BOLD] don't you understand?

It would include all of the criteria that you have listed.

The NHS testing regimes (blood tests on liver and kidney function after 40, or younger if you take certain medication) probably do uncover metabolic problems early.

This thread is Anglo-phobic. My dear, dead father was English. Born in London. Emigrated to the US as a wee boy. You imply that the English are all drunks. My father never, ever drank before breakfast. Yes, he suffered from advanced kidney disease at the end of his life, but ultimately it is smoking that killed him, not booze.

r83 Interesting cultural difference.

I just think the Brits have unhealthy habits. Excessive alcohol consumption, and their diet is a recipe for colon cancer.

R85, that answers some of it but I am asking for an all inclusive definition. That is the only way you can compare anything that seeks to analyze. What about taht do YOU not understand? You keep talking in circles and not providing the answer. Conclusory statements are not answers that allow others to discern whether the conclusion is an apt one.

Even in referring back to my suggested criteria you are vague. Is it just medical criteria or is it also behavioral?

I hope you're not a teacher or responsible for training anyone.

We’re not drunks—just tired and emotional.

[quote] . I was drinking 3-4 bottles of wine a day average.

Not glasses... [Italic]bottles[/italic].

As one gay YouTuber likes to say "Lord, have all the mercies!"

We "prohibit" our kids in the USA from drinking alcohol until they are 21.

English kids are taught how to drink alcohol appropriately when they are young: some families are more permissive than others. There isn't the teenage dare to do it when it's not legal. The parents and kids are on the same page.

That’s why Americans don’t drink till their senior year of college 🙄 !? Or shall I say when we go University😆

We can’t live without televised sport. The alcohol just breaks up the time between games.

Most American kids start drinking by the time they're 14. They do pot and pills too. Open you eyes,

America doesn’t go for BOOZE and DOPE!!

[quote]We can’t live without televised sport. The alcohol just breaks up the time between games.

And enhances televised sport. Pubs with big screens for big games are packed. Get there early to avoid disappointment.