Josephine Alford
… here’s how it went.
During Freshers’ Week, we ran Alcohol awareness quizzes across all the campuses to see what our students knew about alcohol and the amount of units in specific drinks.
The drinks we chose were based on what we sell the most of at The Students’ Union Bars. Students had to guess the units in a pint of beer, a pint of cider, a bottle of beer, a small bottle of prosseco, a glass of wine, a single vodka and a VK bottle. At the end of the quiz, we talked through what the right answers were and gave advice on how students could cut down on their drinking.
We spoke to over 150 students of various ages (and a few parents too!) We found that in general, students overestimate the amount of units. Whilst on average they tended to be more accurate with pints of beer and cider, students drastically overestimated the other drinks – especially the spirits. This could be because spirits are often involved when drinking heavily.
The NHS website says:
“Units are a simple way of expressing the quantity of pure alcohol in a drink.
One unit equals 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol, which is around the amount of alcohol the average adult can process in an hour.
This means that within an hour there should be, in theory, little or no alcohol left in the blood of an adult, although this will vary from person to person.
The number of units in a drink is based on the size of the drink, as well as its alcohol strength.”
We picked the following alcoholic drinks and relevant servings because that is what we sell in The Students’ Union Bar:
Pint of Beer (Amstel) – 2.3
Pint of Cider (Strongbow) - 2.6
Bottle of Beer (Corona) – 1.5
Bottle of Prosecco (200ml serving) 2.4
Glass of Wine (Medium, 175ml) 2.5
Single Vodka Coke – 1
VK Bottle – 1
Counting your units can be a really useful way of keeping track and being more mindful of your drinking. You might want to cut down on your drinking for a number of reasons; maybe its just for one night because you have uni the next day, maybe you want to cut down because you can’t quite drink as much as your friends or maybe you’re conscious of your alcohol intake and want to drink less.
Whatever your reasons, we recommend getting to grips with units and tracking what you drink. We recommend getting the drinkaware app – it is a really simple way of tracking what you’re drinking and it gives you useful stats like how much money you’re spending: drinkaware.co.uk
Find out more about Alcohol Impact and the Late Night Do It Right Campaign
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