Sober Curious, Mindful & Alcohol-Free Drinkers Podcast: Low No Drinker
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Sober Curious, Mindful & Alcohol-Free Drinkers Podcast: Low No Drinker
#62 What exactly is a unit and how many are in my favourite drinks?
In this week's FAQ, we cover:
0:20 What is a unit?
1:11 Processing a unit of alcohol in the body
1:53 Calculating units in a drink
3:44 Units in your favourite drinks
5:49 UK unit guidelines
6:06 What this means for low/no/light
8:32 Access the free unit guide
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Best episode to listen to next:
#56 FAQ: What does ABV mean? (and how does it affect low/no drinks?)
#60 FAQ: What are alcohol-free RTDs? (and where can I find them?)
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Also mentioned:
Get the unit calculator inside the free Low No Nation New Citizen Quick Start Guide
If you could spare me two minutes to rate and review the show on your podcasting app of choice, you'll make me the happiest little podcaster in all of Low No Nation 😊
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Hello and welcome to Low-No Drinker FAQ, a weekly look at the world of low-no and light drinks, drinkers and drinking where, each week, I'll help you to find, understand and enjoy the amazing drinks that allow us all to live a life less intoxicated. I'm Denise Hamilton-Mace and I'm the founder, editor and host of all things Low-No Drinker. This week's FAQ. What is a unit? So you to the doctor for a checkup and the doctor says to you how many units of alcohol do you drink in a week? And one of two things invariably happens. The first is that you lie and say, no, doc, I only have one or two a week. I swear I have. The second is that you look at the doctor baffled and confused, because you genuinely have no idea how to answer that question Because, like most people, you don't actually know what a unit is, just like most people don't actually know what a calorie is. But we're not here to talk about calories Today, we're talking about units. So let's dive straight in and give you the explanation.
Speaker 1:A unit is considered to be 10 milliliters or eight grams of pure alcohol. So 10 mils of pure alcohol equals one unit. It takes the human body an adult human body about an hour to process a single unit of alcohol. Now this of course does vary by person. It depends on things like their height, their weight, their gender, their general health. But in general, you know, a petite five foot two female is going to process alcohol differently than sort of your archetypal six foot four rugby player, because there's less of her rugby player, because there's less of her, so it's a bigger job for her body to do. But generally it takes about an hour for your body to process a unit of alcohol. So how many units are in a drink? So the unit content of a drink depends again. So everything depends. But it depends on a couple of things. It depends on how big the drink is, so how much drink you're having, and how high the ABV is of the various ingredients in your drink. So we did an episode on ABV a little while ago. If you need to go back and listen to that, I will link it in the show notes below for you.
Speaker 1:But very briefly, abv stands for alcohol by volume, so it depends on how strong the drink is that you're consuming. For example, take a lager. You can have two pints of lager and one of them could contain three units of alcohol because it's say a 5.2% ABV, and the other one could contain just over two units of alcohol, because it's perhaps a lower sort of three and a half percent. There is a formula that you can use to calculate how many units are in a drink. So if you are mathematically minded and you like doing things and figuring it out for yourself, I will give you the formula, but you don't have to do this. There are actually calculators online that you can get from places like Alcohol Change UK that can help you figure this out for yourself. But if you want to do it yourself, the formula is ABV of the drink, so how strong the drink is. So the ABV times the volume, so how big it is in milliliters, divided by 1000, and that gives you the units. So, to use an example of a 5.2% lager in a pint, the formula would be 5.2 times 568, because that's how many mils are in a pint divided by 1000, which would give you 2.95 units in a pint at 5.2%. Um, I do have these written down for you, so I will give you links to them all at the end, don't worry.
Speaker 1:Um, in simpler terms, let's look at a couple of the drinks that you might normally drink when you're out and see how many units are in them. So if you drink bottles of lager and we'll just go with an average 5% beer at the standard 330ml bottle, that usually contains 1.7 units of alcohol. A draft pint of lager so that's going to be bigger than a bottle is 568 mils in a pint. And if you were going for a lager, that's say 3.6%, so slightly lower ABV lager that contains just two units of alcohol. Now a large glass of 12% wine so that's the average ABV for wine is 12%. A large glass which is 250 mils, or one third of a bottle, contains three units of alcohol.
Speaker 1:And that one I find really interesting. Because if you think about times when you go out, perhaps if you're in a relationship where you're going out with your fellow, if you're sort of a petite female not to stereotype, but just for an example if you're a petite female and you are going out for drinks with your fellow and he's quite large and you are trying to keep up with him and he's drinking pints and you're drinking large glasses of wine, you're having an extra unit for everyone that he's having. So it's little wonder that you're going to end up feeling rather worse for wear on your way home in comparison. Of course I know that there are other relationship types out there, but just to exemplify the point A shot. So if you are having a single shot, so just 25 mils of I don't know tequila or Sambuca or something, a single shot of spirits is one unit of alcohol and an RTD. So we did an episode on RTDs a little while ago, ready to drink. I'll link to that in the show notes for you as well.
Speaker 1:Rtds usually have an ABV of around about 4.6% ABV and they're 275 mils in size and that contains 1.3 units of alcohol size and that contains 1.3 units of alcohol. Now to put all this in perspective, the UK guidelines recommend that we have no more than 14 units a week and that those are spread out over several days. You can't save them all up to go and get leathered on the Saturday. You're supposed to spread your units out throughout the week. If you are still imbibing full strength alcohol, what does this mean for low, no and light drinks? Well, obviously, if you're going for an alcohol free drink or a non-alcoholic or even a proper low ABV so not above 1.2, then you're generally going to have drinks that have zero to 0.5 ofa unit in them, but a lot of people who are listening are still imbibing alcohol or they're perhaps moderating.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of mid-strength drinks out there as well that are sort of like you know your 6% wines and your 10% gins or even a 25% gin. So if you are managing your alcohol intake by unit, it's really useful for you to be aware of how these units are calculated and how many you're consuming at any given time. There are also people in this space like Camille Vidal, who writes regularly for Lono Drinker magazine and she's created perhaps the ultimate online alcohol-free cocktail recipe resource at lamazonwellnesscom. I highly recommend you go and check it out. I'll link it in the show notes as well, but on there she also has a selection of one-unit cocktails which I think are a great option for those who are still drinking but wanting to drink less, but still wanting to have that taste of alcohol. So these drinks take that unit, count right down, so you imagine if you're having something like a margarita or even like an old-fashioned, which is just generally pure alcohol. A lot of people love a negroni, which again is just pure alcohol. She's got recipes that you can use to take these drinks and turn them from being three or even four unit drinks, all the way down to just one unit cocktails, and then, of course, there are other people that do that as well.
Speaker 1:So I think things like that are well worth checking out, because it helps you keep your options open. Just make sure that you stay aware of things like your portion sizes and and and it depends on other things as well, like you know your own proportions, your bodily proportions, uh, how well you handle alcohol. Um, because you know some people. I had a friend who just had an intolerance to alcohol. So even if she just had one or two glasses of wine the next day, she would feel really, really unwell because she just had an intolerance to it. So units alone and ABV alone are not enough for you to decide on how you're going to drink. You have to think mindfully about how it's impacting you and whether or not you think that that is worth the payoff. I guess Now I did mention earlier on that you didn't have to memorize that formula.
Speaker 1:I have created a guide which has all of this information in it, so if you would like to get your hands on that, it's very, very simple. All you need to do is go to the website and head to the free gifts page where you can download the Lono Nation New Citizens Quick Start Resource Guide, and in it there are several guides, including places to go where to buy drinks, and discounts in there. But there's also this unit guide in there as well, so you can download that and that's got the formula, plus links to online calculators that you can use if you want to calculate these things for yourself, and you can find that at lonodrinkermagazinecom. Forward slash free gifts. That's it for this week, if you could do me a little favor.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned previously, this new FAQ section is lots of fun. I'm really enjoying doing it and I do have quite a few topics that I'm going to cover. But I want to know what else is that you want me to look into for you, what questions you have that you'd like me to answer. The easiest way to do that is to just drop me an email so you can email me directly. You can go to the website and use the contact me form. The easiest thing to do is just to reply to one of my newsletter emails. Hit reply. That will come straight to me and I will be happy to answer your questions. I'll answer you straight away as well, by email, but you might also make an episode as well. That's it for now. I'll catch you next time.
