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酒精在许多西方国家无处不在，大多数食用酒精的人没有我们通常想到的“饮酒问题” - 他们在社交上喝酒，对他们的日常生活几乎没有负面影响。他们有庆祝的东西吗？香槟酒。工作完成了吗？酒吧的啤酒，或街上酒吧的酒。夏天艰难的院子工作？冰镇啤酒撞到了现场。和朋友一起吃晚饭？一个社交玻璃（或两个）葡萄酒。

But just because you don’t have a drinking problem, it doesn’t mean your drinking can’t cause you problems. Increasingly, research shows that即使以非常低的水平饮酒也会对您的健康产生不利影响, with very recent research suggesting thatno alcohol at all might be the safest policy.

When people are choosing to drink … they’re doing so in ways that are influenced by, and reinforce, their identities

Because of this, even people who don’t have a “drinking problem” are still at risk of experiencing health problems related to their drinking. We’re interested in what alcohol means for these people and how we can make it easier for them to drink less, so we conducted a systematic review of the literature.

Unsurprisingly, there turned out to be limited research on people without drinking problems. What we did find, though, told us some very interesting things. When people are choosing to drink, they do so to relax (which most of us would probably already suspect), but also that when they choose what and how to drink, they’re doing so in ways that are influenced by, and reinforce, their identities (such as workers and parents) and their expressions of gender.

我们的research didn’t tell us was also very interesting. Health wasn’t very important to this group when they were talking about how they drank, or made decisions around their drinking. It was far more important to them that they were drinking the “right” way – that their alcohol consumption fit into the socially acceptable narrative of their gender and identity.

我们如何减少这组饮酒？

Currently, there is very little in the way of campaigns designed to intervene in the drinking of middle aged social drinkers. Most alcohol campaigns target heavy drinkers, and young binge drinkers who are likely to put themselves and others at immediate danger with their drinking.

这是我们进行这项研究的原因之一：如果我们wereto target these drinkers, what sort of things speak to their experiences? We now know that unacceptable drinking behaviors are one of the things that might influence this group.

We usually think of young binge drinkers when we think of unacceptable behaviors, such as public drunkenness, throwing up in the streets, getting into fights, and walking out in front of traffic. These aren’t the behaviors our group were concerned with, though, so the types of campaigns that target young people are unlikely to influence middle aged social drinkers because their behaviors are very different.

Something that might work in this group are reminders that if you drink, you can’t always fulfill your obligations as a parent. It’s harder to get up early and drive the kids to soccer on Sunday morning if you’re a bit seedy from the night before. Or maybe, just drinking at every social occasion sets the example for your kids that it’s normal to drink all the time.

有些事情可能有问题。例如，告诉女性喝少的东西，因为这是一个不好的外观，而一种可能是围绕饮酒的性别结构的有效方法，这是一个问题，因为它加强了性别之间的社会不平等想法。

Ultimately we need to do a lot more research on this group and how alcohol consumption fits into their lives. If we don’t know about them, we can’t be effective in reaching them with important messages to improve their health.