A few records stand the test of time.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Steven Petrosino is the Beer Chugging World Champion. On June 22, 1977, at the Gingerbread Man bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he drank 1 liter of beer in 1.3 seconds. This beat the previous record by 56% and has not been surpassed in almost 41 years.
Apparently plenty of people would like to challenge it.
A survey on alcohol consumption was conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. One researcher used the data to break weekly alcohol consumption into deciles, or groups of ten percent.
The bottom three deciles, or 30 percent of Americans, say they don’t drink at all. The fourth decile consumes .02 drinks per week, which works out to a single drink per year. The next decile consumes about 7 drinks per year. The sixth decile consumes 32 drinks a year. So, 60 percent of Americans aged 18 and over consume half a drink or less a week. Are you surprised?
Moving on:
The seventh decile consumes 2.17 drinks per week. The eighth decile consumes 6.25 drinks per week. While one daily drink could be justified for the heart health benefits of red wine, it still means they drink more than 70% of us. The ninth decile consumes 15.28 drinks per week, or 2 per day.
But if you’re a high achiever and want to be in the top decile, you have to consume almost 74 drinks a week, or 10 a day. That is almost 2 six-packs per day, with no days off. Put another way, the top 10% of drinkers account for more than HALF of all alcohol consumed in the United States.
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Adapted from the webpage “Drinking Your Way to the Top,” by Alli Sands, December 17, 2013.