Most people will have a reason to want a drink: you have had a great day and want to celebrate, it is Friday after all! Or you have had the worst day ever and need to take the stress away and unwind there are lots of reasons as you can imagine!

According to Drinkaware, The Chief Medical Officer's guidelines for both men and women is to keep alcohol to a low level. Therefore, it is safest not to drink more than 14 units a week on a regular basis. If a person drinks as much as 14 units, the advice is to spread drinking over three days or more.

So what exactly is a unit of alcohol?

It's actually 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol. Putting this in perspective, it's important to remember that alcohol comes in different strengths, shapes and sizes, and therefore units will help you keep track of how much you have drank in the week. Drinkaware have exampled how a unit appears below which you can read further detail on here. 

Unit caution!

Patients tend to under report how many units of alcohol they drink a week when they talk to healthcare professionals. This is partly because people are embarrassed to admit how much they actually drink and also because many people either don't know what a unit is or overpour (pouring alcohol without measuring) when at home.

The UK government's Know Your Limits Campaign discovered that the average amount of spirit poured at home was 38 ml when a single unit is 25ml. This would mean someone reporting one drink of spirits a day as 7 units would actually be drinking closer to 11. For the most generous overpour in the survey - 57 ml this would be 16 units a week!