With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, followed immediately by its obnoxious cousin Black Friday, a lot of people will probably be consuming a lot of alcohol. After all, nothing makes a Big Gulp-sized Jack and Coke sound quite as refreshing as listening to your aunt pontificate a bunch of nonsense about blocking Syrian refugees using only the most carefully selected fabrications. But, before you build that extra large Jack and Coke, wouldn't you like to hear a bunch of statistics?
A new study from researchers at the National Institutes of Health shows that women in the United States are "fast approaching" men in terms of how much alcohol they consume, according to Vice. Researchers meticulously explored a decade’s worth of drinking stats from 2002 to 2012, discovering that women who reported drinking alcohol in the past month jumped from 40 to 48 percent. As for the guys, the number of drinking men dropped from 57.4 to 56 percent.
During the same 30 day period, the number of drinking days for women increased from 6.8 days a month to an average of 7.3 days. However, if you throw a little weed into the action, the story is slightly different:
Dr. White notes that there was only one measure, for any age group, for which the male-female drinking difference actually became greater during the study period.
