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Young adults driving teetotal trend
One in five UK adults now identify themselves as teetotal, a 2% increase on 2005, a change driven by young adults who are increasingly turning their backs on booze.
According to the Office of National Statistics, 21% of adults are now teetotal, compared with 19% in 2005. This change, the ONS says, is being driven largely by young adults who are shunning alcohol, with the proportion of 16 to 24 year olds reporting that they do not drink alcohol at all has increasing by more than 40% between 2005 and 2013.
More widely, the proportion of adults who binged at least once in the week decreased from 18% in 2005 to 15% in 2013. Again, it was young adults who were found to be driving this trend with the proportion who admitted to binging falling by more than a third since 2005 from 29% to 18%.
Almost a third of adults in London (32%) said that they do not drink alcohol at all – considerably higher than any other region in Great Britain. This was followed by the West Midlands at 25%, Wales at 22% and Scotland at 21%.
Acknowledging these regional difference, the report notes: “Although it is difficult to attribute regional differences to any single factor, London is the most ethnically diverse region of the UK and has a lower than average population age of just 33. Both of these factors may play a part in London having a higher than average number of teetotallers.”
Comparatively, adults in the north of England and Scotland were most likely to binge drink than anywhere else in Great Britain.
Speaking to The Guardian Matt Bale, an ONS researcher, acknowledged the findings were likely to be skewed by people consciously or unconsciously underestimating their alcohol consumption. “We asked people about their drinking but we didn’t measure it ourselves or factor in people’s propensity to not give the whole truth when self-reporting about this issue,” he said.
While indicative of an increasing trend among young people, the study has been criticised for being misleading. Professor Ian Gilmore, who initiated the Alcohol Health Alliance UK when he was president of the Royal College of Physicians of London, warned that the results could lead people to dramatically underestimate their own drinking habits.
“HMRC data shows that people are buying twice as much alcohol as they admit to drinking,” said Gilmore. “If you divide the total amount of alcohol bought by the number of non-teetotallers in this country, you find that people are drinking an average of 25 units a week. That means that far from reducing alcohol intake, the average person’s drinking is at the highest possible end of the maximum recommended limit.”
Prof Mark Bellis, spokesman for the Faculty of Public Health, added: “This survey is hiding lots of alcohol consumption in groups whom we need to challenge about the issue, such as middle-aged drinkers who are known to drink far more than recommended levels without considering it to be a problem.”