The following is excerpted from an online article posted by Relevant
Mocktails have their own section on the menu now, and “sober curious” is a personality. The generations that made that happen are finally showing up in the data. So is the one that didn’t.
Alcohol use among U.S. adults has fallen for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to a new Keck Medicine of USC study published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. Gen Z and millennials led the drop.
From 2022 to 2024, the share of adults who drank at all fell by nearly 2 percent. Heavy drinking fell by more than 8 percent.
Gen Z had the biggest decline in drinking at all, down more than 5 percent. Millennials had the biggest decline in heavy drinking: 17 percent in two years.
But Gen X adults 50 to 64 went the other way.
In that age group, alcohol use rose nearly 4 percent between 2018 and 2024. Heavy drinking rose by more than 36 percent.
“Heavy drinking among ages 50-64 is up by more than a third since 2018, a concerning trend because this age group faces some of the greatest risks of harm from alcohol, including cirrhosis and alcohol-related cancers,” said Dr. Brian P. Lee, the Keck Medicine hepatologist who led the study.
That risk isn’t abstract. Alcohol accounts for roughly half of all liver-related deaths, according to Lee, and alcohol-associated cirrhosis is now the leading cause of liver transplants. The study drew on more than 100,000 respondents, who answered privately online instead of over the phone, and it follows Lee’s earlier research showing drinking climbed during the pandemic and kept climbing for two years after. Overall, Americans are still drinking more than they did before 2020.