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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?”
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.
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