Politics, Culture Wars
Carrie Nation at the Centers for Disease Control
by Clay Staggs
Binge drinking is a problem, right? I mean, who's going to dispute that? But how widespread is this problem? Well, according to a new study by the federal government's Centers for Disease Control (your tax dollars at work), over 17% of US adults binge drink, and the average binge drinker binges over 4 times per month. See the whole dumb report here, and the CDC's “fact sheet” here.
Now, what that means is, just slightly fewer than one in every 5 adults you run into is binging every weekend or so. Geez, somebody ought to do something about these out of control party animals, huh?
But stop and think about that. Really? Almost 1 in 5 adults are binge drinkers - and regular ones at that? Something is amiss, methinks. Wonder how they define “binge”? Well, turns out, that's really an interesting thing to see. The survey from whence all this springs defines a binge as 5 drinks for men (or 4 drinks for women) “per occasion.”
Ah, yes, the devil is in the details, isn't it? What's an “occasion”? This term was undefined to the survey participants, and so they evidently supplied their own meaning to that term. Is an “occasion” an entire dinner party, which may span 3 or 4 hours? A football game, plus the tailgating beforehand, which might be 5 hours? Unknowable.
But this much is knowable. For a grown adult, a drink per hour is NOT binging, by any reasonable definition. But as bad as it is that their survey terms are vague, and that they have the standard's set ridiculously low, there's something even worse here on the CDC's part: outright manipulation of the survey.
On the fact sheet, the CDC defines “binge” this way:
Binge drinking means men drinking 5 or more alcoholic drinks within a short period of time or women drinking 4 or more drinks within a short period of time.
Now, that's expressly NOT what they asked in their survey. They did not ask whether people had 5 drinks in “a short period of time.” Rather, they asked whether they had had 5 “per occasion.” But hey, what's a little deception when you need to create a public heath crisis?
Remember this the next time you see some statistic from the government that sounds out of line with reality. Maybe it is.
Exit Question: How many glasses of wine do you think these guys had at their last dinner party?
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