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What are you drinking?
Do you know how much alcohol you're drinking, whether it's on a night out with friends or enjoying a bottle of wine at home with your other half? The truth might be surprise you.
The Echo's Don't Be a Boozer Loser campaign, running this fortnight, is urging people to drink sensibly and stick to safe limits.
The NHS advice is that men shouldn't regularly drink more than three to four units of alcohol a day, while women shouldn't exceed two to three units daily.
But do you really know how much a unit is and how many are in your favourite drink?
It may be a surprise to hear that a large glass (250ml) of 12 per cent wine is three units, while a pint of beer, lager or cider (five per cent) is 2.8 units.
As part of the Don't Be a Boozer Loser campaign, we're asking people to pledge to stick to recommended limits.
A good way to find out how much you're really drinking could be to keep a drink diary, as Echo feature writer Alison Goulding did (see below).
A Department of Health spokesman said: "The NHS recommends men shouldn't regularly drink more than three to four units a day and women shouldn't regularly drink more than two to three units a day.
"That's equivalent to two small glasses of wine for women or two pints of lager for men, so its easy to see how a few drinks with friends after work, or a bottle of wine with dinner, can quickly add up."If you regularly drink more than the recommended limits you increase the risk of damaging your health."
He added: "Most people who suffer from health problems because of their drinking are not alcoholics – they are people who drink heavily over a number of years.
"Our Know Your Limits campaign arms people with the facts about how many units are in their favourite drinks and the health risks linked to regularly drinking over the recommended daily limits."Experts say that alcohol measures and the strength of drinks have increased over the years, which has lead to people consuming a growing amount.
Colin Shevills, director of Balance, the North East alcohol office, said: "People have started to drink more and more over the last few years almost without realising it because glasses of wine, for example, tend to be bigger and drinks tend to be stronger than they were."
Colin says that people might not know how much alcohol they are drinking.
He said: "People are only beginning to understand the whole concept of alcohol units. They may think of a pint of premium lager as one unit of alcohol when it's actually three units.
"If you have two pints of premium lager, you've gone over the limit. If you do that regularly it could end up leading to health problems."
As the Echo revealed yesterday, doctors at Sunderland Royal Hospital are seeing an increasing number of younger patients who are suffering from liver conditions caused by alcohol.
Dr James Crosbie, consultant gastroenterologist, said: "The age people start drinking at and the amount they drink and the strength and cheapness of alcohol are making a big difference to the age and severity of the problems we see.
"We have people with liver problems in their 20s and 30s.
"It's a general increased consumption of stronger alcohol that has become more prevalent over time.
"There's a definite increase in incidence of alcohol-related liver disease and deaths related to alcohol."
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Friday 10 February 2012
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