The U.S. is in the midst of a temperance boom. Drinking rates have been steadily declining nationwide, with an August Gallup poll showing that only 54% of Americans ever consume alcohol—sharply down from 67% as recently as 2010.
Now, a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine takes those findings a step further, reporting that younger adults in the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts—people born from 1981 to 2012—are driving that trend. Meanwhile, older Americans, aged 50-64, are actually consuming more alcohol than they used to, with rates increasing by more than one third since 2018.
“It’s encouraging to see alcohol use decline for the first time since the start of the pandemic,” said lead author Dr. Brian Lee, a hepatologist and liver transplant specialist with Keck Medicine of USC, in a statement that accompanied the release of the report. “However, use remains above pre-pandemic levels and certain groups continue to have concerning trends.”
Lee and his collaborators conducted their work by sifting through the responses from more than 114,000 U.S. adults who, from 2018 to 2024, participated in the National Health Interview Survey—an annual study conducted by the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. The survey consists of several face-to-face interviews throughout the year. In the current study, researchers looked at whether and how much respondents drink; heavy drinking, for instance, is defined as five or more drinks per day or 16 or more per week for males, and four or more drinks per day or eight or more drinks per week for females.
Americans saw a 2% drop in overall drinking and 8% in heavy drinking in just the 2022 to 2024 window. Total drinking dropped most dramatically among Gen Z, with rates falling nearly 6% from 2022 to 2024, compared with about 2% for Millennials. Heavy drinking fell by roughly a fifth in both generations.
Older Americans, however, went in the opposite direction, with those in the 50 to 64 age group seeing an increase of 4% in overall drinking, and 36% spike in heavy drinking from 2018 to 2024.
The reasons for the changes are not clear, but greater public awareness of the health risks of drinking may play a role in alcohol’s overall decline. Alcohol has been linked to 62 different diseases, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, especially liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and various forms of cancer. But not all Americans are equally aware of alcohol’s health harms. Past Research from 2024 found that far more younger people know that alcohol negatively affects health compared to older adults.
Some of that knowledge may track back to the COVID-19 pandemic. “There was a lot of messaging around young adults who were dying more from alcohol-related harm during the pandemic,” says Lee. “So they could have been targeted for this.”
It’s seniors, however, who could most use the same kind of public information, especially as their drinking rates go up—because the older people get, whether they drink or not, the more likely they are to contract most diseases. “This age group faces some of the greatest risks of harm from alcohol, including cirrhosis and alcohol-related cancers,” Lee said in the statement.
Public information campaigns are just one of the possible causes of the drop in drinking among young people. It’s also possible that Gen Z and Millennials are simply swapping one intoxicant for another. “The idea of substitution is a leading theory,” says Lee. “With the legalization of cannabis, are people using that rather than alcohol?”
And sometimes, it might simply come down to money—which most older folks have in relative abundance compared to younger people. “Younger adults in general have less disposable income [to spend on alcohol] than middle-aged or older adults,” says Lee.
Reducing drinking—or cutting it out altogether—may ultimately be a self-reinforcing habit, as social expectations shift in a newly temperate demographic. “When fewer people around you drink, there is less and less societal pressure,” says Lee. “Older adults grew up in an era where everyone was drinking heavily around them and it was acceptable, whereas that’s no longer the case among Gen Z or Millennials.”
Whatever the causes of our society’s new sobriety, the less alcohol anyone consumes, the better. Young people may have tumbled to that truth first, but the older age groups among us would benefit from doing the same.
The post Why Older Americans Are Drinking More Alcohol—Not Less appeared first on TIME.
