“More than 10 glasses per week, we increase the risk of having an illness,” says an addictologist

Alcohol is held responsible for 41,000 deaths per year in France.

“More than 10 glasses per week significantly increases your risk of developing an illness.” estimates Philippe Batel, psychiatrist, addictologist and head of the Charente addictology service, invited Tuesday January 23 on franceinfo, on the occasion of the publication of a Public Health France study on alcohol consumption in France. The study reveals a drop in daily alcohol consumption in France, divided by three in thirty years, but a continuation of one-off drinking, i.e. more than six drinks on a single occasion. France remains among the largest consumers in Europe with 10 and a half liters per year per French person, ahead of Germany and the United Kingdom. Alcohol is responsible for 41,000 deaths per year, causes around sixty diseases and 8% of all new cases of cancer.

franceinfo: Is it worse to consume alcohol every day or to consume a lot on just a few days a month?

Philippe Batel: The worst is consuming alcohol beyond the recommendations that come from numerous scientific studies. They try to determine benchmarks, which should not be taken as thresholds, because there is great inter-individual variability, with people who are very sensitive to alcohol consumption and will develop illnesses, others much less. But we know that drinking more than ten glasses per week significantly increases your risk of developing an illness. And when we talk about ten glasses, we’re talking about ten standard glasses, so the one you order when you’re in a bar: a balloon of red, a baby of whiskey, a beer, a half, a cognac… We’ll tell you serve an alcohol unit. At home, we are, as a general rule, much more generous. What we know, basically, is that your body has a kind of memory and it is the number of drinks you have had over your entire life that will ultimately impact most illnesses.

What are the particular dangers of “binge-drinking”, heavy occasional drinking, which is stagnating in France ?

We need to change the ideas we have about alcohol. There are many false ones, and particularly dangerous ones. Regarding binge-drinking, the first representation we have is that it is young people who practice it. But not at all. When we look at the figures, we realize that there are now 30% of adults between 25 and 35 years old who have this type of alcoholism. They drink at the end of the week. The dangers that we have specifically with this type of alcoholism are not simply the fact of being stopped on the road and having a blood alcohol level above the legal limit. These are also strokes, violence suffered or committed.

“We talk a lot about violence against women, it is very linked to alcohol consumption, both among the perpetrators and the victims.”

Philippe Batel, psychiatrist, addictologist

at franceinfo

And then there is non-consensual sex. There are falls, trauma, alcohol-related disabilities.

Is it all about alcohol?

That’s what’s important. Some people will think: but what is this difficulty in enjoying that explains to us each time that alcohol is dangerous and responsible for all ills? That’s not what I’m saying. I say that alcohol plays a part in it and we really have very solid scientific data on this. I’ll give you an example that seems very striking to me. There is, at the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT), a vigilance study which focuses on drownings. Imagine that if you drown, and you are between 15 and 30 years old, alcohol is involved in 85% of these drownings. We rarely have a link as strong as that in medicine and statistics. To put it the other way around, if you’re young, and you know how to swim, you can’t drown if you’re not drunk. Same for cancers. Alcohol is a potentially carcinogenic product. That makes eight cancers, including breast cancer. We are not telling you that alcohol will systematically cause cancer. It will participate in a cluster of factors which will promote this pathology.