Drug education groups fear safe drinking messages could be missing the age groups most likely to drink on a daily basis: people aged in their 60s and 70s.
Tasmania’s Drug Education Network (DEN) carried out research with community service groups and health workers and found older Tasmanians consumed alcohol more frequently than young people.
DEN’s state manager Ronnie Voight said the results were surprising because community concern was usually directed at young people binge drinking.
“The 70 year olds are our highest daily drinkers in Tasmania and our 60 year olds are our second highest daily drinkers, so they are consuming a lot of alcohol,” she said.
Their findings have been backed up by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s latest National Drug Strategy, which found among those aged 70 or over, 21 per cent of men and 10 per cent of women drank alcohol every day.
Younger age groups were more likely to binge drink.
DEN is worried alcohol education campaigns targeted at young people are missing the mark among older people.
It has developed a booklet called Wiser and Older to help guide older people’s choices about alcohol.
The booklet will be available from health services and the DEN website.
Ms Voight said alcohol affected people differently as they get older.
“It takes them an hour-and-a-half to two hours to process the same amount of alcohol that a young person would process,” she said.
Older people also take more medications and suffer more adverse interactions with alcohol.
Call for recommended daily intake to be cut
Ms Voight would like the recommended maximum daily alcohol intake of two standard drinks to be reduced.
“For older people and for younger people that in fact probably should be one-and-a-half standard drinks or even one standard drink.
“Or for some people, who may have compromised health, it may be half a standard drink.”
She called for people of all ages to take heed of the safe drinking message.
“If everybody made a choice to say, ‘I’ll be really conscious about my drinking, I’ll reduce it by half’ we would have an amazing impact in the health and wellbeing of Tasmanians.”
Helen Duggan, 67, and her friends provided feedback to DEN on the Wiser and Older booklet.
She said she usually has a glass of wine with her evening meal and considered herself a responsible drinker.
“That is the case, I think, with our social group. We just enjoy having a few drinks together but nobody sort of loses control or overdoes it,” she said.
But she was surprised learn alcohol could affect older people more quickly and for longer periods.
“I was surprised that as we age our bodies hold less water and so therefore we have less water in our bodies to help dilute the alcohol and so that kind of made me aware.
“I need to pace myself and have a drink of water in between times.”
She said the booklet’s clear diagrams of what a standard drink looked like have changed the way she approached alcohol.
“I thought I was being very responsible but I do sort of tend to fill the glass and now I know that ‘Well, that’ll do me, I don’t really need to go back for another one’.”