Wine, beer or spirits? Europeans can’t kick their traditional drinking habits

Whether it is the French penchant for wine, German fondness for beer or a shot or two of sprits in the Baltics, European countries can’t seem to kick their traditional drinking habits, researchers have found.

A study looking at drinking patterns across Europe from 2000 to 2019 has found little sign of countries shifting their preferred type of alcoholic beverage, prevalence of drinking, or boozing behaviours such as binge drinking.

“This shows that cultural factors such as traditional beverage preferences, social norms around drinking, and historical consumption patterns contribute significantly to the stability of drinking patterns,” said Daniela Correia, lead author of the research from the World Health Organization (WHO) regional office for Europe.

“For instance, wine has been a staple in Mediterranean countries for centuries, while beer has deep roots in central European countries,” she said.

Writing in the journal Addiction, Correia and colleagues report how they looked at drinking patterns in EU countries, as well as Iceland, Norway and Ukraine, for 2000, 2010, 2015 and 2019.

The team used data from the WHO global monitoring system on alcohol and health, which draws on figures from official records around sales, taxation and production and other factors, together with country-level surveys. The researchers also looked at measures of alcohol-related harms.

The analysis revealed six clusters of alcohol drinking patterns in Europe in 2019. One was wine-drinking, encompassing countries such as France, Greece and Sweden, while another cluster was formed by countries with a high consumption of beer, a relatively low consumption of spirits and the highest consumption by tourists, with Austria, Denmark and Germany among them.

Croatia, Hungary, and Slovakia were among the countries in a cluster with the highest consumption of beer, a high prevalence of binge drinking, and a high consumption of spirits, while Ukraine, Bulgaria and Cyprus formed a cluster defined by having the highest prevalence of non-drinkers, but high and regular consumption of spirits.

A cluster comprising Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had high sprit and beer consumption but low levels of binge drinking, while the final cluster was defined as having the highest prevalence of drinkers and binge drinking and counted Finland, Iceland, Ireland, and Malta among its numbers.

While the UK was not included in the analysis, Dr Jürgen Rehm – a co-author of the research at the University of Toronto – said data suggests it would fall in the same cluster as Germany.

When the team analysed the drinking patterns for 2000, 2010, and 2015, they found the same six clusters, although another a cluster was found in the year 2000 that represented countries with low general alcohol consumption, such as Greece, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden.

The team add that over the entire study period, 20 out of the 30 countries stayed in the same cluster, and most of those that switched had been part of the low-alcohol consumption cluster that subsequently disappeared.

The team say wine-drinking countries had the lowest rates of alcohol-related deaths and years of healthy life lost in 2019. However, the Baltic cluster with high spirit consumption had the highest rates – experiencing 90 more alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 people than wine-drinking countries.

Rehm said the results contrast with a number of studies suggesting changes in drinking behaviour in individual countries. “We were quite surprised that de facto not a lot changed,” he said.

Rehm said the study has important implications. “Alcohol is part of the fabric of European life, and it’s here to stay. And there’s nothing bad about that. It’s just part of our culture, and cultures don’t change that quickly,” he said.

But, Rehm added, it is important that drinking is reduced in order to cut the rate of alcohol-related diseases, injuries and deaths.

“We could have a life expectancy which is two and a half [or] three years more, if not so many people [died] of alcoholic-attributed deaths,” Rehm said.

“From a public health point of view, we would like to have less alcohol. And in order to achieve that, we have to come up with means which respect this culture.”