Teenagers regardless of their gender drink nearly equal amount of alcohol

Enjoying red wine.Photo: Gorm Kallestad / NTB scanpix

A new British study shows that girls and women aged 16 to 25 drink almost as much as young boys and men. The pattern is similar in Norway.

In the study, published in the British Medical Journal, researchers have looked at alcohol consumption among women and men in several generations in the past century.

The tendency is that the new generation women have approached consumption level registered for men, wrote the newspaper VG.

In Norway, there is now very little difference on alcohol consumption between the different genders of young people in range of 15-16 years of old, says researcher Ingeborg Rossow.

– Consistently we can say that in European countries girls drink often or much at a time which we can say that it is equivalent or even slightly more than boys.

Danish girls, for example, is on top in Europe when it comes to drinking pattern but same for Danish boys, says Rossow, who works at the National Institute for Drug Abuse (SIRIUS).

The new study compares the result of several previous studies.
For those who were born between 1891 and 1910, there were 3 times more likely that a man drank alcohol than that a woman did it.

Potentially problematic alcohol consumption was 3 times more among men as women and alcohol-related health problems occurred 3.6 times as frequent.

Today these ratios are 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3. The difference between the alcohol consumption among different genders has never been smaller than today.

 

Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today