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One-third of Kiwis binge drink despite drop in NZ's alcohol consumption

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Thu, 9 May 2019, 7:46AM
Kiwis on average may be drinking less, but one-in-three are still binge drinking. Photo / Getty Images.

One-third of Kiwis binge drink despite drop in NZ's alcohol consumption

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Thu, 9 May 2019, 7:46AM

New Zealanders are drinking much less than 20 years ago, bucking a global trend of rising alcohol consumption.

Millennials are partly driving the trend, as the younger generation are increasingly risk-averse and health conscious.

But despite the drop in consumption, one-in-three New Zealanders are still binge-drinking regularly, a study published in the prestigious Lancet journal shows.

Between 1990 and 2017, Kiwis' average alcohol consumption fell from 13.5 litres of pure alcohol a year to 10.8 litres a year.

That meant New Zealanders older than 15 were drinking around three standard drinks, or three bottles of 4 per cent beer a day - almost 1100 a year.

Around 11 per cent of New Zealand adults did not drink at all, while 34 per cent had a heavy drinking episode - 60mg of pure alcohol or around six bottles of beer - at least once a month.

Alcohol Healthwatch executive director, Nicki Jackson, told Mike Hosking an increased focus on health by millennials is one of the reasons we are indulging less.

"It's young people who don't want to become out of control. Young people's attitude has changed remarkable in relation to alcohol."

High-income countries across the world are all following the same trend and drinking less, she said.

While this all might seem like a good thing, Jackson says there's a catch. "These changes actually happened back in 2007 in New Zealand and we haven't seen this transition through into those older cohorts," she said.

"So once people reach the age of 18, they come into our heavy drinking culture and adapted...so consumption for 18 to 24-year-olds is still remarkably high."

One in five Kiwis are hazardous drinkers and many more exceed the drinking recommendations.

Jackson said these people "make up" for the rest of the country and are the reason our average three drinks a day.

"These are averages across the population. So we have huge parts of the population that drink a lot more than that [three a day]. So that's masking some really huge increases in drinking that we have seen in middle-aged adults."

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