This Drinking Habit Is More Dangerous Than Bingeing

The holidays offer an excuse to gather with loved ones, let loose and indulge: Plates loaded with comfort foods. Unapologetic napping. All the pie.

And, for some, plenty of alcohol.

But heavy drinking is not limited to the holiday season. Nor is it mainly the pastime of college students.

Overall binge drinking rates are now equivalent among young adults and those in midlife. That’s because young people, especially young men, are bingeing less — while middle-aged adults are throwing back more alcohol in a single session than they previously did.

We’ve long been warned about the risks of binge drinking, usually defined as having four or five drinks in a two-hour span. And now researchers are increasingly focused on a more dangerous pattern of alcohol use that they call high-intensity drinking: consuming eight or more drinks in a row for women and 10 or more drinks in a row for men.

High-intensity drinking is even riskier than binge drinking, and it’s on the rise among certain segments of the population.

How does high-intensity drinking differ from binge drinking?

The definition of binge drinking stems from the work of Henry Wechsler, a social psychologist at Harvard University who in 1993 tracked alcohol use among college students across the country. He found that young women who reported consuming at least four drinks in a night and men who consumed at least five experienced the most drinking-related problems.