Global alcohol intake has increased by 70%, study warns

People around the world are drinking more alcohol than they were almost 30 years ago.

New research conducted by a team of investigators from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, in Toronto, Canada, and the Technische Universität Dresden, in Germany, has revealed that people consume more alcohol, on a global level, compared with nearly 30 years ago.

Not only this, but the current upward trend is set to continue over the next few decades, according to the study authors’ estimates.

“Our study provides a comprehensive overview of the changing landscape in global alcohol exposure,” explains first author Jakob Manthey.

The research — the findings of which appear in The Lancet — analyzes trends in alcohol intake in 189 countries from 1990–2017 and estimates the rates through to 2030.

Manthey and the team analyzed levels of alcohol consumption per capita (per individual), as well as the implications of this consumption, working with data sourced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Burden of Disease study.

Moreover, the researchers tried to find out how many people had never drunk alcohol and how many qualified as “binge drinkers,” defined by an intake of 60 grams of pure alcohol or more at a single sitting.

For this side of their analysis, they used data for the same period, 1990–2017, collected through surveys in 149 countries, for nondrinkers, and in 118 countries, for binge drinkers.

Finally, the team looked at estimates of gross domestic product in all 189 countries, as well as other relevant information, to try and gauge how alcohol drinking patterns might evolve until 2030.