You will be shocked to hear that, according to a new report in the journal Addiction, the UK government's drinking guidelines are incompatible with the UK's drinking habits. Solving the problem might lie in a counterintuitive update: accepting the reality of binge drinking.

The guidelines suggest a number of alcohol "units" per day that shouldn't be regularly exceeded—2-3 units per day for women, 3-4 units for men. But because people in the UK often go days without drinking and then go on a giant bender, the guidelines aren't all that useful. They don't say anything about reasonable limits for someone who wants to drink more heavily on one night out of seven.

The researchers conducted interviews with 66 people across England and Scotland, grouping people according to age, gender, and socioeconomic background. They found that the guidelines didn’t fit with the actual role of alcohol in people’s lives: aside from not giving any advice for occasional binge drinking, the use of “units” made people’s eyes glaze over. Calculating units on the fly isn't exactly what you want to be doing on Friday evening at the pub, so people are more inclined to keep track of how many glasses or bottles they’ve had.

The study participants indicated that they do moderate their drinking, but not because of health concerns so much as everyday needs: safe driving, family and work responsibilities, and avoiding hangovers. They responded more positively to the guidelines used in Canada and Australia, which suggest different rules for daily and occasional drinking, giving advice like not drinking for 48 hours after a binge.

This research doesn’t give a broad perspective of how closely UK residents adhere to the guidelines—it’s more a snapshot of the opinions of a number of people—so it doesn’t necessarily mean that the guidelines have never had an impact on anyone. Nonetheless, it’s a strong argument for taking culturally specific behaviour into account when forming public health guidelines.

Government drinking guidelines are used as a way to inform the public about the health risks of alcohol, as well as a way to provide an objective definition of “risky drinking” for health professionals, the authors write. If the guidelines don't take the real world into account, and are widely disregarded as a result, they might as well be beer mats. It's worth searching for a model that would find a more comfortable home in the UK.

Addiction, 2015. DOI: doi:10.1111/add.13072 (About DOIs).