Boak...or is it Bailey...have a good post up tonight about the issue for non-drinkers in relation to drinkers. They/he/she ask how much is too much?. I think about this a fair bit. I try to find a guideline I can live with - and have found that I haven't needed to resort to either those Czech or Finnish studies nor do I entirely buy the correlation between beer consumption and scientific discovery. No, I think there is plenty of good sense about pacing yourself - though it seems really too hard to determine what that the pace might be, as B' or B' note:

...the evidence supporting the current limits (2-3 per day for women, 3-4 per day for men) is not exactly conclusive. And certainly compared to what the average Brit actually drinks on a Friday night, it seems extremely low.

What gets me about these numbers is that they come across as wishy washy. What is, after all, a "unit"? Why can't the milligrams of alcohol per ounce be noted on each bottle and each of us be aware of what that limit is? If 750 ml of 10% head banging beer makes 7.5 units why can't the bottle also say 38% of your recommended weekly limit? Would you have an issue with that?

This stuff should be measurable and explicable. Think about it. If 10 ml of pure alcohol is a unit, then your average male gets 210 ml a week or 21 units. The World Health Organization says Canadians (and Americans) average a bit over 8 litres of year pure alcohol a year or 800 units, well under the 1092 that we should try to keep under. But if women should only have 728, the average might be a bit worrisome. Then add in the t-totalers and those who drink rarely and it all looks a bit wonky - we must be over. Then consider that most attendees at your weekend average beer fest these days use up about six cat lives worth of recommended allowance and you start to remember how so many of those craft beer writers, mentioned here, from the '60s "passed away unexpectedly" or were "taken at too young an age."

Yet this might just be The Great Fear, our abiding pal in this 21st century. Consider that our friends the Czechs take in almost twice as much as Canucks blowing the recommended weekly average out of the water with a hefty average intake of over 16 litres or 46% on average across the board more than is recommended - as an entire nation. And Czechs have a life expectancy of 76.42 years while the average Canadian male can now be expected to live a whopping 78 years. Is that 1.58 year of life not lived in Prague, as opposed to Moose Jaw or Moncton, related to alcohol consumption, is it statistically unimportant or are there a myriad of other factors at play, too? And would you rather give up 1.58 years to not live in Moose Jaw?

Even though I am a blogger and this goes against the bloggers' pledge, I am not one to jump up and down to say I don't understand the science therefore it must be bad science but I wish this was all made clearer. Surely there should be a better way of describing the recommended beery lifestyle without recourse to that most scientific principle of "shouldn't."