A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has some pretty disturbing numbers when it comes to the drinking, and binge drinking, in the United States. Now to be clear on what is meant by binge drinking the CDC classifies you as a binge drinker if you consume excessive amounts of alcohol four or more times in a month.
Using that as the classification the CDC says that one in six American adults are binge drinkers and after breaking all the data down into segments like geography, age, and income level they say that Wisconsin has the most binge drinkers at 25% of the population and Utah comes in last with only 11%.
“Binge drinking falls into a category of risky drinking,” Dr. Marc Galanter, director of the NYU School of Medicine’s Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, told The Daily. “As someone who treats people with alcohol problems, I’ve seen people start with binge drinking and carry on to more severe alcoholism.”
The CDC report noted that half of all alcohol consumed in the U.S. is consumed during binge drinking. For young people, that rate shoots up to 90 percent.
via The Daily
The problem is that binge drinking, especially among college and university students, is considered to be socially acceptable but is also responsible for more than 40,000 death per year as well as contributing to violence and drunk driving.
