While Americans and Brits both have strong drinking cultures, neither holds a candle to countries like Latvia, Austria, and even a collection of South Pacific islands.
This is evident from figures from the Central Intelligence Service (CIA) in 2019, which analyzed the average liters of pure alcohol each person drank in 189 countries.
The Cook Islands – a collection of islands in the South Pacific – topped the list, with the average person consuming about 13 liters of pure alcohol a year – that’s more than 100 glasses of wine.
The UK made the top 25, ranking 24th out of 189, while the US took 35th place.
Data collected by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ranked the alcohol consumption of 189 countries. The Cook Islands, a collection of 15 islands in the South Pacific, topped the list, while the UK and US placed 24 and 35 respectively
The data was collected as part of the CIA’s World Factbook, a reference database that provides detailed demographic information for 266 countries.
Three of the countries in the top five are in Eastern Europe, the birthplace of vodka, which has one of the highest rates of alcoholism.
For example, more than one in ten men in Latvia and Lithuania depend on alcohol.
Austria, where the legal drinking age is 16, rounded out the top five and also has a strong beer culture.
About half of Cook Islands adults over the age of 18 drink alcohol, with some groups having as many as 10 drinks on a single night out.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 2.3 billion people around the world are considered “current drinkers,” meaning they regularly drink alcohol. This is almost 30 percent of the world’s population.
The Cook Islands is a self-governing nation in the South Pacific, nearly 2,400 miles from New Zealand, made up of 15 islands.
The whole country has about 17,500 people and the economy revolves around tourism. According to CIA data, more than half of the alcohol Cook Islanders drink comes from spirits, such as vodka, whiskey, gin and rum.
A separate report from the Cook Islands Ministry of Health and WHO found that nearly half of all Cook Islands respondents have consumed alcohol in the past 30 days.
Alcohol use was more common in men, who made up about 57 percent, versus women, who accounted for 37 percent.
The researchers also noted that on a single drinking occasion, male drinkers consumed 9.5 standard drinks, while females drank 6.3.
A standard drink contained about 10 grams of pure alcohol. In the US, a standard drink contains 14 grams of pure alcohol, according to the National Health Institutes.
Pure alcohol is measured as one milliliter for each percentage of the drink’s strength if there is at least 100 milliliters of it. For example, a liter of 37.5 percent vodka contains 375 milliliters of pure alcohol, while five percent beer would contain 28.4 milliliters of pure alcohol.
Men between the ages of 18 and 44 drank an average of 10 drinks per occasion.
On average, the report found that men drank about 4.9 times per month, while women had 4.2. That means that young men can drink more than 50 glasses a month.
Lower on the list are the US and UK, where drinking is an important part of both cultures.
Europe has the highest per capita alcohol consumption of any continent in the world, according to the WHO.
According to Data for 2021 of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Britons consume an average of about 4.4 pints of beer or 2.3 bottles of wine per week.
They also tend to binge drink more than most other countries, with 51 percent of all alcohol consumed in the country consumed by heavy drinkers — defined as drinking two pints for men or one pint of beer for women per day by the OECD.
In the US, 213 million people ages 18 and older have reported drinking alcohol at some point in their lives, according to the 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).
About a quarter of American men and a fifth of American women have reported binge drinking in the past month.
The US may rank lower than the UK due to a higher drinking age. While Americans have to wait until they are 21 years old to legally drink, Brits can do so at 18.
At the bottom of the CIA list, all tied to 0 liters per year, were Bangladesh, Kuwait, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.
In Bangladesh, consumption or sale of alcohol was prohibited for religious reasons at the time the CIA data was released. However, last year the country relaxed its laws to allow anyone to drink with official permission.
It is still banned in Kuwait, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.