Countries of drinking

Many people love drinking, but at the same time we think that drinking can cause disease or death. 

It is difficult to say how much litre is critical, but this may be true.

In his blog (Creative Class), Richard Florida introduces a report by WHO (World Health Organization). The title of this report is "Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health". WHO researched the situation of alcohol drinking in the world. 

This report shows some interesting facts and results. Among them, I picked 3 figures from this report below, and going to think about the relationship between economic level, alcohol consumption and disease.

This report says 

Worldwide per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages in 2005 equaled 6.13 litres of pure alcohol consumed by every person aged 15 years or older.

And first figure shows that people in high economic level countries tend to drink more than people who live in low economic areas. According to this article (The Huffington Post), you can find top 25 countries. Most of them are in Europe (South Korea is 12th drinking country though!).  
Does it mean developed countries have so many alcoholics with disease cause by alcohol? It is not true. 

Second figure shows the percentage of people who don't drink alcohol. 
For me this result is very interesting. This shows that in developed countries, the rate of abstainers are low (less than 20%). It means in these countries most of adults are drinkers. 
So in these countries, even though alcohol consumption per capita is relatively high, it doesn't mean each drinker consume too much. 
For example, in France alcohol consumption is 13.7 litres per capita (No.15 in the world). Because there are few abstainers in this country, each drinker's volume is also around this volume. If abstention rate was 10% (0-20%), alcohol consumption per drinker would be 15.2 litres.


On the other hand, some countries, such as Russia or Mexico, absentention rate is higher. It means the percentage of drinker is lower than developed countries, and each drinker seems to consume higher volume of alcohol. Sometimes maybe high enough to cause disease or death.
For example, in Russia alcohol consumption is 15.7 litres per capita (No.4), with 20-40% of absentainers. If this is 30%, alcohol consumption per drinker would increase to 22.4 litres.  
You can see the big difference between these two countries.

Alcohol-attributable DALYs (disability-adjusted life year) is not so low in Europe or North America. However, DALYs of Russia or Mexico are higher than these developed areas. 


Of course it is too rough thinking, and we can say just trend. However, the trend is also important, and very interesting.
Anyway just drink for fun, and don't drink so much :)


By the way, I realized from this report that South Korea one of the top drinking countries. 
I won't try to beat them by drinking (^_^;)