Mad Friday , the last working Friday before Christmas, is the day when the most alcoholic drinks are consumed in the year – this year Mad Friday fell on December 18.
Typically, drink related calls to the emergency services double as revellers down more booze than they are used to.
Drinking to excess is not advisable for anyone –but how do you know how your drinking rates as excessive?
You may find that drinking a lot less than you do still ranks as excessive and getting blind drunk is just the top end of the scale.
To help, the BBC has a calculator that compares your tipple to the average drinkers have in other countries.
Working out how much you drink
All you have to do is to input how many pints of beer, glasses of wine and shots of spirits you have drunk in the past week and the calculator does the rest.
For expats, the calculator compares your consumption to that of other nationalities.
That’s not a suggestion that you should move from a teetotal state to another where the inhabitants down a lot more booze, but just an idea of where you sit in the global drinking table.
The calculator also works out your annual alcohol consumption from the drinking data you input – and that can be quite an eye opener.
After all, drinking a pint of beer a day turns into 365 pints a year.
In a typical British pub a pint costs an average £3- so that’s almost £1,100 disappearing behind the bar annually.
How much alcohol should you drink?
That depends on the government advice and laws of the country where you live.
Another factor is medical research revealing that 70% of cancers are lifestyle related and the two main causes of the disease are alcohol and smoking.
Other factors include gender, height, weight, general fitness and age.
Taking a test on the British government DrinkAware web site is aimed at understanding the impact drinking has on your lifestyle and health.
“The calculator shows exactly what your relationship with alcohol is, whether it is right for you or whether you need to review how much you are drinking and should take some action,” says the web site.
Doctors have long linked excessive drinking to poor health.
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