Making non-alcoholic beer more widely available on tap will encourage people to make healthier choices, a study suggests.
Customers bought less standard beer, but replaced it with non-alcoholic variants, without a decrease in the bars’ total turnover.
Alcohol can lead to weight gain and addiction and has been linked to seven types of cancer, including mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, breast and colon.
Offering alcohol-free options is often seen as a good alternative for people who want to live a healthier lifestyle.
For the study, researchers from the University of Bristol, in collaboration with Bristol City Council, recruited fourteen pubs and bars across the city.
Alcohol can lead to weight gain and addiction and has been linked to seven types of cancer, including mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, breast and colon.
None of the locations had previously offered non-alcoholic beer on tap or on tap.
The pubs and bars completed two intervention periods and two ‘control’ periods in random order over eight weeks.
The intervention consisted of replacing one alcoholic beer on tap with an alcohol-free beer. The control period of the study was ‘business as usual’.
Analysis found that when an alcohol-free option was available, pubs and bars sold an average of 29 fewer liters of alcoholic beer per week, equivalent to 51 fewer pints and a 5 percent drop in sales.
However, this was replaced by an equivalent increase in sales of non-alcoholic beer, indicating customers were choosing the healthier option.
Furthermore, there was no impact on the money taken, suggesting the change has not made pubs and bars worse off.
The team concluded in the journal Addiction: ‘The introduction of non-alcoholic draft beer in bars and pubs in England reduced the volume of alcoholic draft beer sold by 4 percent to 5 percent, with no evidence that the intervention had an impact on net profits. gain.’
Dr. Angela Attwood, associate professor at the university’s Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group, said: ‘Although non-alcoholic options have been available in pubs and bars for some time, they have not had the same visual prominence as alcoholic drinks and are rarely served on the table. provisional version.
‘Our research showed that offering non-alcoholic tap options at the front could lead to some customers switching from alcoholic drinks.
‘This does not limit consumer choice; In fact, it increases the options available to the customer, and at the same time can reduce alcohol consumption among the population and improve public health.”
Ivo Vlaev, professor of behavioral sciences at Warwick Business School, said the “study underlines the power of nudges in shaping healthier societal choices.”
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He added: ‘By simply making non-alcoholic beer more visible and accessible – essentially changing the choice architecture in bars and pubs – the research taps into fundamental human biases towards easier, more prominent options.’
A spokesperson for the World Cancer Research Fund said it was ‘encouraging to see that making non-alcoholic beer more visible to consumers has led to them making a healthier choice by choosing the non-alcoholic option’.
However, he added: ‘As with alcoholic drinks, the sugars and calories in non-alcoholic options can vary.
‘That is why it is best for your health if you choose smaller sizes. So instead of a pint, choose a bottle or half a pint.’
Matt Lambert, CEO of The Portman Group, the industry-funded alcohol labeling regulator, said: ‘We welcome the findings of this study, which highlight the importance of venues voluntarily increasing the availability of low- and no-alcohol alternatives and normalize these products.
‘This also reinforces our own research showing that these products are an essential tool in helping people moderate their alcohol consumption and reduce wider alcohol harms such as binge drinking and drink driving.’
The latest data, collected by the World Health Organization and compiled by Oxford University-backed platform Our World in Data, shows that British wine consumption has risen to 3.3 liters of pure alcohol per year (2019), up from 0 .3 liters which was recorded almost 60 years earlier in 1961. It now accounts for over a third (33.7 percent) of all alcohol consumed across the country and is almost on par with beer (36 percent ), which has plummeted from 5.8 liters in 1961 to 3.5 liters today.
The NHS recommends people drink no more than fourteen ‘units’ of alcohol – around six glasses of wine or pints of beer – per week. This has been diluted in recent decades in light of studies illustrating the health dangers of alcohol
Researchers from the University of York said there is not yet enough data on consumer behavior around non-alcoholic and low-alcohol drinks to say they are a healthy alternative to alcohol.
Professor Victoria Wells from the university’s School of Business and Society said: ‘Although the non-alcoholic and low-alcohol industry is booming in terms of sales, we know very little about how, when and in what ways it is chosen and used by consumers.
‘If we really want to promote it as a product that could help reduce the number of serious diseases such as alcoholism and obesity, and improve healthy drinking habits more generally, then we need the data to prove this, and a more formal strategy for how these drinks are marketed to consumers to ensure they are consumed appropriately.”