The study in scientific journal Addiction, found that spirits-drinking countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Cyprus, had the highest average alcohol-attributable deaths and health harm.
But those who drink low levels of spirits and mainly moderate levels of wine had the lowest levels of alcohol-associated deaths, such as France, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Sweden.
The study also found that there was high levels of beer drinking in Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. It also found that the highest lifetime abstinence countries were Ukraine, Bulgaria and Cyprus, which also had the lowest prevalence of drinkers — although those that did had high and regular consumptions of spirits.
Binge drinking
Countries with the highest prevalence of current and binge drinking including Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Malta.
Looking back almost 20 years, the same overall clusters were in place from 2000 to 2019, with two-thirds of the countries staying in the same cluster for all measurements.
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