Op-Ed: This St. Patrick's Day a New Look at Alcohol Ingestion and Health

With St. Patrick's Day upon us, a new alcohol awareness site from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism aims to help imbibers understand the limits and the damages of drinking too much.

St. Patrick's Day has become a celebration of public binge drinking for many revelers, particularly in the United States - where it has long lost touch with its considerably more sober religious history. The problem has become so pronounced that many cities are offering free transportation services to help avoid drunk driving. The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, NIAAA, has recently launched a Web site to better educate the public on the limits of alcohol consumption. Rethinking Drinking acts as a tool to better gauge individual usage based on behavioral patterns that users input. "Most people don't know what 'drink responsibly' means - they think it means not getting tanked," said Mark Willenbring, director of treatment and recovery research at NIAAA - in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "But there are heavy levels of drinking that raise your risk for alcohol problems just like high cholesterol raises your risk for heart disease," he said. The Web site offers a number of interactive tools and resources on the nuances of limits and informs without dictating. Features include calculators for alcohol calories, for cocktail content, for spending habits, and for drink sizes - and there are interactive worksheets to help plan changes and to keep track of drinking behavior. For many of us, the day after St. Patrick's Day will be rough - but with resources like those supplied by NIAAA, we can understand more fully the longer-term risks and still ensure a brush with the luck of the Irish.