While we are in the middle of Dry January , the Public Health France health agency has just unveiled the results of a study to identify in which regions of France daily alcohol consumption is the highest. And it is in... Occitanie, in the south of France, that this daily consumption is the strongest. Conversely, it is in Île-de-France that the proportion of people who drink alcohol every day is the lowest.
Occitanie is above the national average (10%) with 12.6% of adults aged 18 to 75 who drink alcohol daily compared to 7.1% in Ile-de-France, note Public Health France.
The other regions where daily consumption is the highest are Nouvelle-Aquitaine (12.3%) and Hauts-de-France (11.5%), and the one where it is lowest are Normandy (7. 9%) and Pays-de-la-Loire (8.1%). Finally, in Overseas France, daily consumption is significantly lower than in mainland France (5.2% in Guyana, 5.8% in Réunion, 6.9% in Guadeloupe and 7% in Martinique)
Like daily consumption, heavy occasional alcohol consumption also varies by region. This is the monthly consumption of six glasses or more on a single occasion.
Here again, it is Ile-de-France which displays the lowest figures:this concerns 13.9% of adults, compared to 20.5% in Brittany, the region where this consumption is the highest. The national average is 16.2%.
Santé publique France also notes that the alcohol consumed is not the same depending on the region:the regions of the North, East and Brittany consume more beer than the rest of the country, while wine consumption is higher. in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, regions of high wine production.
For the first time, the health agency also measures the short-term effect of alcohol. On average, depending on the region, every day, between 1.2% and 3.1% of visits to the emergency room are directly related to alcohol consumption in a man. Two regions are distinguished by their extremes:Mayotte with a rate of 0.2% and Reunion with 7.3%. Overall, all sexes combined, 45-60 year olds are more affected by these passages, mainly for alcoholic comas.
Last March, the agency defined new consumption benchmarks “lower risk “:“Alcohol is a maximum of two drinks a day and not every day ". According to the latest available data, 24% of French people have a higher consumption.
Public Health France recalls that alcohol consumption is one of the main causes of avoidable mortality "with 41,000 deaths in 2015" , 30,000 in men and 11,000 in women.
Women who, according to the findings of a 2016 study published in the medical journal BMJ Open , now drink as much as men. So pleasure yes, but in moderation.
