How much is too much

Not having a drink before getting behind the wheel is the safest bet, but if you do have a drink, how do you know how much you are drinking? These days, particularly with the popularity of RTD (Ready To Drink), pre mixed drinks, together with the huge difference in the sizes of containers that they come in, can be a recipe for disaster.

What is a standard drink?

You may have noticed yourself how stubbies of beer have changed in size over the past 10 years or so. some brands have ‘stubbies’ as small as 320 mls, where other still have the standard 375 mls. RTD containers can vary between as little as 250 mls and 550mls! So how do yo tell how much you have had to drink? When you think you may be over, chance are you will be, so don’t risk Drink Driving, remove the temptation call our wonderful team of Drivers and let them drive you home safely. Don’t think for a minute, think for a lifetime.

To the left you can see an example of the stand drinks logo that you will see on every packaged alcoholic beverage in Australia. The purpose of these logos was to make consumers aware of how many standard drinks they were consuming.

But the number of standard drinks in any given container can vary widely. To look at how widely they can vary you can use this standard drinks chart published by the Federal Government Department of health and Ageing to see just how much it can vary. The chart shows Beer, Wine, Spirits, and RTD (Ready To Drink) examples.

How much is too much?

The old advertising campaigns of the 80’s about ‘three standard drinks for males and two for females’ or ‘rethink your third drink!’ are basically out the window. Some people, due to their stature, eating habits during the previous hours, sleep patterns, the list goes on, can affect how much alcohol they consume and what level of intoxication it has on them. An example of how different sized people can be affected differently can be found in this article on wikipedia on blood alcohol content.

In a nutshell, a 55 Kg person can theoretically only drink half as much as a 109kg person to get to the same level of intoxication. The best thing to do is regardless of how much you think you have had to drink, you should never make driving an option. As you can see, the old ‘three drinks, and one every hour after that’ philosophy is a very inaccurate way of calculating wether you are over the limit.