A Ten-Year Plan To Reduce Global Alcohol Consumption Is Showing Results
By Thomas Pellechia, Contributor
June 10, 2019
There’s a global move to get people to drink less alcohol. WHO is behind the move, and that is not a question, who being the World Health Organization.
As of just a few years ago, a WHO chart listed France’s overall alcohol consumption at number 18 out of 191 countries, behind most of Eastern European and Scandinavian countries. By contrast, the United States (US) is listed in the chart of overall alcohol consumption at 48, behind much of Europe, many parts of Africa and even Canada and Chile.
At the bottom of the WHO chart is another listing the annual per capita alcohol consumption in 34 countries—at just under 9 liters annually the US is in 23rd place, and its per capita alcohol consumption is edged out by Canada and Chile by about 1 liter each. At just under 12 liters per capita, and in third place, France is beat by only Austria and Estonia by just a fraction of liters each.
According to WHO, globally more than 3 million people died as a result of alcohol in 2016, and, “…the harmful use of alcohol causes more than 5% of the global disease burden.”
In 2010, a consensus of WHO members adopted WHA63, a global strategy to reduce alcohol consumption. The strategy homes in on, “…ten key policy options and interventions at the national level and four priority areas for global action.” One of the areas WHO has promoted is lowering blood alcohol limits on drivers to .04%, half of what the standard .08% had become throughout the world. The idea has taken root in Europe and America, elsewhere too; for now, the lowering is limited to .05%, but that slope is certainly slippery.
While the WHO movement to lower alcohol consumption globally concerns itself with alcohol generically, I focus on wine.
It is not a stretch to believe that rising wine prices have at least something to do with the WHO strategy—evidence for this is that another of the goals connected with the strategy is to apply pressure on countries toward increasing the price of alcohol to consumers. It is also not a stretch to believe that the daily number of glasses of wine per day recommended in the US has been influenced by the global consensus. The US daily recommendation of wine per day for women and for men used to be two and three 4-ounce glasses respectively; it has been lowered to one and two respectively. (Incidentally, three glasses of wine nicely equals a half bottle.)
French authorities announced a number of weeks back an intent to do something on a national scale to reduce drinking. The claim is that more than 25% of French adults are over indulging. Specific to wine, OFDT, a French organization that tracks addictions claims “…despite a significant drop in the volume of wine consumed in the last 50 years, it [France] remains the world’s largest consumer…” OFDT says French wine consumption represents 58% of the total volume of overall alcoholic beverages consumed per capita by French people over age 15.
Two glasses of wine daily has been the recommendation for French women and three for French men. The new initiative appears to reduce the recommendation to a blanket ten glasses per week divided by seven days. That’s a far cry from the first major effort to reduce French drinking in the 1950s; then, the recommendation was no more than a liter per meal!
Remember resveratrol? According to Livestrong, a business that promotes healthy living, you’d need to drink almost 40 liters of red wine daily to reap the benefits of resveratrol. Maybe in his long ago Sixty Minutes piece on red wine Morley Safer had a point about it protecting from heart disease, but it’s certain some people picked up on the fact that nothing had been said about potential damage to the liver.
The French national alcohol reduction campaign provides wine consumers in any country a fast and easy way online to learn the risk behind our alcohol consumption. According to the alcoometre, I join an overall 37% of men my age in exceeding the new French guidelines. 22% of men my age drink more than two glasses of wine per day and 23% exceed 10 glasses per week. Don’t ask how the 37% is arrived at, because it is not obvious from the information—is it possible about 15% of men my age have a serious drinking problem, wine or otherwise?
Just last week my primary physician recommended one glass of wine with supper. Does that portend a new downward direction in the US, even lower than the French?