While younger generations are drinking less, adults aged 50 to 64 are drinking more, causing a shift reshaping the US bar scene
Alcohol consumption has decreased across the United States in recent years, particularly among adults under age 40, but there is one older demographic in which more people are drinking than before the Covid-19 pandemic – and more are doing so heavily, according to a new study.
For the first time since before the pandemic, the percentage of US adults who drink any alcohol decreased between 2022 and 2024, according to the report in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. People from 50 to 64, which roughly corresponds with gen X, were the only age group in which drinking continued to increase.
They are likely hurting their health by imbibing, according to the latest science, but they are also helping keep open bars. Such businesses have struggled as younger generations, the drivers of nightlife, move away from booze.
Stop framing it around desire to drink, it’s wealth ffs!
Im an Xer who rarely drinks in adult life but I can say that I have been wanting to drink more since about 2016 and much more since 2024.
Not mentioned in the article: 20- and 30-somethings are broke, and a night out is crazy expensive now. Plus legal weed is waaaay cheaper than alcohol.
ehhh if you’re a PBR enjoyer $12 for a 12-pack is hard to beat. I like my weed, but it ain’t $12 cheap yet here
Bummer to hear. $20 a quarter oz here lasts me longer than two twelve packs, so a little more affordable. It’s definitely not topshelf weed, but PBR isn’t primo either. I’m in cali though where the weed market has collapsed due to oversaturation and over regulation.
Yeah, I only go out on occasions.
This was my argument for a long time. For 25 I get 12 that’ll last me a night IF I don’t share. 25 of weed will get you 3 days if you just smoke j. Plus the whole not becoming a degen that makes bad choices is a plus.
not sure about that last part
plus weed psychosis is realCalling it “weed psychosis” is confusing correlation with causation. Nimbys and cops harass people who smoke weed, making them paranoid. Occasionally they crack and wind up in the psych ward. Doctor sees “weed use,” ascribes causation, and records it as such.
Dozens/hundreds of these cases stack up, some researchers do meta-analysis, nobody points out what would be glaringly obvious to a stoner (and any stoner who points it out gets labeled psychotic/delusional), and the “causality” gets made official.
Then doctors continue recording “psychosis” every time a stoner says “I’m being stalked and harassed,” and the cycle continues.
They are likely hurting their health by imbibing, according to the latest science,
This must be emphasized more. The WHO has made a statement that for usual alcoholic beverages no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. This happened after carefully analysing a large body of research. Much earlier, alcohol has already been assigned to the highest class of carcinogenic substances, class 1. It sits in the same class as radiation, tobacco and asbestos.
Yes they know that they dont care they’re not looking forward to a long healthy life.
I mean, with all respect, have you seen the state of this fucking world?
As an older GenX I will say that my drinking hasn’t really increased, but it never really decreased from my college level in the first place.
But I don’t want to live to 80, 90 years old anyways.
Kids are grown, lost my wife to cancer 5 years ago. All of our nest egg went into her end of life care so retirement’s not an option. Everything hurts and I have to work until the day I die.
I got maybe 5-10 years left in me. Tops.
As a fellow gen x’er, I’m sorry for your loss. Take care of yourself, bro.
There is alcohol in lots of food including bread. Your liver is quite capable of handling alcohol.
Baking evaporates all but trace amounts of alcohol…
Our livers can handle most poisons but they all, alcohol included, take their toll.
Bread, yogurt, soy sauce, vinegar, fruit juice
All have alcohol and they are nowhere near the risk of asbestos lol
Wait until you learn about dosages, going to blow your mind
You’ll find relative and absolute risk a crazy concept
It seems you have neither read my comment properly, nor the WHO statement. This is about alcoholic beverages as usually sold and consumed. No statement was made about alcohol content in apples, bread, and alike.
No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
It is
Yeah now you are starting to troll. Click on the link. Read what I have written before the link.
I’m not. Just debating it.
Much earlier, alcohol has already been assigned to the highest class of carcinogenic substances, class 1. It sits in the same class as radiation, tobacco and asbestos.
Tobacco contains about 250 carcinogens when combusted, that’s way more harmful than alcohol.
They may be in the same class, but the risk profile is much lower for alcohol. The most common is colorectal cancer, and the risks are minimal
For every 1,000 heavy drinkers over a lifetime, roughly 11 additional cases of colorectal cancer would be expected compared to 1,000 non-drinkers
I think this is a good example of risk through the lens of policy versus risk through the lens of personal choices.
There is no safe amount of alcohol when it comes to a government recommending the use of a substance. The decision to say “one glass a day” by the government has been shown to lead to adverse health outcomes in the population.
You are speaking to the chance that a single individual will experience adverse health outcomes from choosing for themselves to have a glass a day. You are probably right that on an individual basis it is a reasonable risk to take (though I don’t know what the exact numbers suggest).
People often confuse policy level risk assessments with individual risk assessments, without considering the law of large numbers, and how a policy maker must make decisions for the population, not an individual.
Party pooper
And yet a lot of centenarians have their cocktails before bed. I think it must be the binge drinking that really hurts you. Or maybe the not going to bars and getting diseases from other drinkers part?
So the thing is, most centenarians happen to be from places that are either terrible at book keeping or at some point had a lot of their written records destroyed. There’s a strong chance that most centenarians aren’t actually over 100 years old, that their birth certificates were either faked or mismanaged along the way.
Stress is the number one killer and the core of so many health problems. Alcohol causes physical health problems too, but it is also so good for relieving stress. With any drug just know what and why you’re using and do it intentionally; medical vs. recreational use, and use vs. abuse. Drinking alone out of habit when you’re sad is bad drinking. Having a bottle of wine between friends or a tipple as part of a getting ready for bed relaxation ritual can be good drinking.
Agree on stress being a killer but frankly, this is cope. Alcohol as part of a going to bed ritual is pretty much alcoholism.
I think we’re imagining very different scenes. If you knock back a shot of vodka when you brush your teeth at night that’s probably alcoholism, a little glass of something mixed with a book and a robe in your library after supper isn’t usually.
Your liver doesn’t know that you’re enjoying a good book, sorry. 😔
Y’all have lost the thread.
Nuance and reading comprehension people.
Eh I’m going to take a turn on this. My Garmin watch measures my heart rhythm through the night and can absolutely report super poor sleep for the first few hours if I have 2 glasses of wine with supper, with even 1 glass I can see poorer sleep stats.
I can, however, mitigate a lot of that with 2 Aleve taken beforehand, and of course adequate hydration. So my suspicion is that alcohol is inflammatory, and the inflammation causes all sorts of problems that inflammation typically does. Maybe taking the anti inflammatory is enough to mitigate it all, maybe not. But certainly something bad is happening.
Its funny how in spite of all the advances in technology and research a healthy life always comes down to stress, diet, physical activity, sleep and social life. The factors we’ve known about since forever.
Just for your information, sitting in the same “class” as tobacco and asbestos doesn’t mean what you insinuated here.
Asbestos is orders of magnitudes more carcinogenic than alcohol, don’t be alarmist
I have never once in my life lifted an alcoholic drink without that information.
Look, have a drink every now and then. It’s fine. Moderation is key, we’re not meant to live forever and a life lived for 150 years in a fuckin bubble is silly.
I get it, it’s a carcinogen we all know. So is smoke, should I stop enjoying a lovely campfire?
Should I stop leaving my home because someone could kill me?
The bars around me charge nearly $20 for a mid drink like vadka redbull or a rum and coke. Fuck the bars. Fuck everything they stand for.
Don’t forget to tip on top of it all!
We’re hitting the age where we realised we’ve got another forty fucking years of this instead of dying at fifty like we hoped
One of my Gen-X friends was telling me how he started drinking more during COVID.
He said one day the supermarket cashier remarked “oh hey, are you throwing a party?”
And he said “nope, this is just my personal weekly alcohol consumption.”
Awkward!
They’re at that age range where their house should be paid off by now, allowing them to have a few beers at a restaurant without maxing out their credit card.
Effect meet cause.
I swear to god both of my non-drinking kids make me want to drink more.
Uh…. I guess I’m in the minority. 39 and drinking a box of wine (4 bottles) in a weekend with my partner and their other drinks may be involved + a gummy.
You’re not gen X lol
Well yeah, Gen X is now the generation of the Bosses. The boomers are retiring, and Gen X fills the gap. So they now have the money to throw around. Whereas anyone younger can’t afford shit.
Nobody is lining up for the $14 six pack at the grocery store. I’m not exaggerating, I’ve even cut back simply because I can’t justify the cost. I’m not paying a %50 increase for the same beer I bought six years ago.
I switched to hard liquor, much cheaper
I partially did. A bottle of cheap swill costs as much as a beer at a restaurant or pub.
Yep, I fully agree
$14 six pack is a bargain here. Most 4 packs are $25 in Australia. Steak night at the pub is strange as your beer costs more than your steak.
excuse me, what the fuck
i assume you meant the Min wage, yes its that low been for many decades. neither party in the us wants to change it significantly. some states have did thier own increases, but its not enough because COL.
It’s not. In comparison it’s about the same. The local minimum wage here is about $15, and federal is an astounding $7.25 where as yours is around $25. I’m just using the figures to say either way you have to work for at least an hour to get beer. A four pack of
niceactual beer is $20-25 or more if you like the higher end stuff like the 120 minute IPA it’s $40 for a four pack. I just drink trash now.Mate me too, I only buy cartoons (24packs) of the cheap stuff. Smithys was on sale yesterday for $50 so that’s the poison this week.
I think the best deal I can get is 24 cans of PBR for about $14 when it’s on sale.
That’s a bargain
Yeah it’s the best deal around, usually sells out in days.
Wait, do Australians really call 24-packs of beer “cartoons”?
I want to verify this, but with how much search engines suck these days I fully expect that if I look up “Australian cartoons beer,” it will ignore the word “beer” and just return page after page of Bluey.
I meant cartons. We locally call them slabs
Carton*. Or chazzwozzer.
Isn’t meat production heavily subsidized by the government because corruption?
Hah, not this genx. 51 on dialysis for kidney failutre (fuck fascism) so I took my habit of hardly drinking down to no drinking.
Oof gl fellow lemming gl.
thats why Alochol industry is so afraid of WEED and GLP-1, especially the glp-1 like ozempic and semiglutide.
Weed is the new alcohol.
