Alcoholic Beverage Preference and High Risk Drinking

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Most recent studies have suggested that beer is associated with high risk of mortality and morbidity. The purpose of this study was to investigate how beverage types affected high risk drinking for chronic harm. METHODS: We analyzed data from 1997 Korea's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey collected through telephone interview based on the multi-stage stratified random sampling (N=1,045). According to the WHOs guidelines, we categorized alcohol consumption per day into three risk levels for chronic harm and employed logistic regression analyses by adjusting for confounding factors including the number of beverages consumed, smoking, BMI, stress, and subjective health. RESULTS: Those who preferred soju were almost three to four times as likely to involve medium or high risk as those who preferred beer. In addition, compared to the beer-preferring drinkers, those who preferred spirits had more than five times of possibility in high risk drinking. However, both of those who preferred makkolli or wine and of those who preferred beer were exposed to high risk drinking to a similar degree. CONCLUSION: In Korea, preferred types of alcoholic beverage turned out to be very important factor of high risk drinking behavior. Therefore, we need to encourage drinkers to switch high alcohol to low alcohol content beverages.