Is the alcohol content of your cocktail too high? Use the new "cocktail content calculator" to know for sure.
When you're at a party or drinking with friends, you don't really keep count of how much alcohol you gulp down. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has come up with a solution for this. They've developed the "cocktail content calculator" to help determine how strong a drink is.
The device is designed to let users know exactly how potent most popular drinks are. For example, the "calculator" equates a typical pina colada to two "standard" drinks, which according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism is "about 0.6 fluid ounces or 14 grams of 'pure' alcohol."
The calculator also provides useful guidelines about how much one should drink. The website states that people should not drink more than one "standard" beverage per hour. According to the guidelines, men should not have more than 4 drinks a day and a maximum of 14 drinks a week. For women, it's not more than 3 per day and 7 per week.
"It makes a difference both how much you drink on any day and how often you have a 'heavy drinking day,' that is, more than four drinks on any day for men or more than three drinks for women," researchers said on the website. "The more drinks on any day and the more heavy drinking days over time, the greater the risk-not only for alcoholism and alcohol abuse, but also for other health and personal problems."
It is very important to keep tabs on how much you drink on a daily bases. A little extra wine at night or a few extra beers over the weekend could be putting you in danger. Earlier last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report suggesting that excessive alcohol consumption is the cause of one in 10 deaths in working-age people.
Binge drinking is the most common pattern of excessive alcohol use in the United States, though people who binge drink are not alcohol dependent. Recently, the Beer Marketer's Insights released a report highlighting that residents of North Dakota consumed 43.3 gallons of beer per drinking-age adult in 2013, the most of any state. This was more than double the 19.6 gallons per legal age adult consumed in Utah, which drank the least beer.
According to a WebMD report, the health consequences of excessive drinking include:
Anemia
Cancer
Cardiovascular disease
Cirrhosis
Dementia
Depression
Seizures
Gout
High blood pressure
Infectious disease
Nerve damage
Pancreatitis
