How many drinks did you have last week? None, say most Canadians
How many alcoholic drinks do you have in a week? That question was posed to Canadians in a survey and most of them said they had no drinks at all, a new Statistics Canada report shows.
In 2023, more than three-quarters (77 per cent) of adults living in Canada’s provinces reported drinking at least one alcoholic beverage in the past 12 months. To better understand regular drinking behaviour, the 2023 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) asked about alcohol use in the past seven days.
Over half (54 per cent) of people aged 18 and over reported not drinking any alcohol at all during the past week, while 15 per cent reported drinking only one to two drinks in the seven days. The survey said 15 per cent of respondents said they had between three and six drinks and another 15 per cent had seven drinks or more in the last seven days.
While the findings are similar to findings in 2015-2016, when 53 per cent respondents said they had not had any alcohol in the last week, the 2023 data comes after years of the COVID-19 pandemic that saw increases in drinking among many Canadians.
However, the numbers look different for men and women.
Nearly twice as many men (20 per cent) as women (11 per cent) said they had seven or more drinks in a week, which is the level of alcohol consumption linked to the highest risk of alcohol-related harms.
The number of men and women having three to six drinks a week (16 per cent for men, 15 per cent for women) was roughly the same, as was the number of men and women drinking one to two drinks in a week (15 per cent for men and 16 per cent for women).
Women had a higher rate of abstinence, with 59 per cent saying they had no alcohol in the week, compared with 49 per cent of men.
The survey also shows
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