The Internet's Worst Drinks Advice This Week (And It Turns Out, Also The Best.)
Between "gin as health tonic" and "teen drinking = success," there's actually something useful between this week's outrageous booze headlines.
Two stories caught my attention this week. Get ready to cringe as we walk through how we’re apparently talking about alcohol in 2025.
First: “Gin and tonic is the least harmful alcoholic drink” (because quinine! because white spirits!).
Second: “Teenage binge drinking leads to greater success in life” (because social capital! because confidence!).
One wellness-washes gin into a harm-reduction strategy. The other sent parents into panic with headlines about teenage binge drinking—before revealing that alcohol’s relationship to success has nothing to do with the alcohol itself. Together, they expose how our cultural conversation around drinking has stripped out the fun, injected social status anxiety and shame-inducing contradictions where nobody wins.
We’ve arrived at a place where every discussion about alcohol ends up in codified social norms (”here’s the less harmful choice”) or moral panic (”no amount is safe!”). We measure alcohol units, calculate risk ratios and debate resveratrol content and argue about safe consumption limits. And somewhere along the way, we’ve stripped all the joy, all the human connection, all the experience out of the conversation.
Absurdly, what science actually tells us is that the fun—the social fabric, the emotional and intellectual wellbeing that comes from genuine human connection—is the most important part of how we drink. No binge required.
So let’s be clear about what gets conveniently left out of every “least harmful drink” article and wellness guide that treats your gin and tonic like a medical intervention:
It’s not what we’re drinking. It’s how we’re drinking.
As someone who drinks for a living, I often feel the shadow of booze-shame. It’s what I’ve coined the uncomfortable shadow— the pressure and expectation that on a night out that I will naturally push the boat out, keep up with the gang, that I’ll always open another bottle or be down for shots. Or conversely—in a world where everyone’s talking about sobriety, I feel the need to explain I do drink moderately, that sometimes it’s just my job and that I don’t have to drink every night—although, I mostly do. Even when it’s not for work. Booze-shame is the anxiety of feeling like my choices are now part of a public conversation because so much public messaging is ‘alcohol is bad’.
Booze-shame pushes us to the binary edges of self-assessment: either having a problem or being completely fine, when most of us would probably benefit sooner from an healthier alcohol conversation that is judgment & anxiety-free. One with moderation actually in the centre. Because alcohol conversations have become so serious in every corner, it’s getting harder to see what a socialised, healthy alcohol culture might look like.
Which brings us back to those headlines. Buried in the wellness-washing and the panic is something actually useful:
Bourbon neat at a dinner table with friends beats bourbon and coke with a cigarette at a bar where you’re drinking to forget.
A glass of wine with a long meal beats three glasses alone on your couch because Tuesday was hard.
Champagne at a wedding beats bottomless prosecco at brunch where you’re just trying to survive the Sunday Scaries.
But which three scenarios do we hear about most? Headlines sag under the weight of how bad drinking alone, drinking to forget, and drinking through depression is for our bodies, our brains and our relationships. I want to remind you how joyous it can be to enjoy a good drink of whatever you like, in a setting that lifts you up. When we inject shame into the conversation, we remove the positive impacts that drinking contexts offer.
That Norwegian study that went viral this week? University of Oslo sociologist Willy Pedersen found that those who drank socially in their late teens and twenties had higher education and income levels—while those who started drinking heavily in early teens were less successful, and those who drank alone showed no career benefits whatsoever. As he explained: “The most likely explanation is that all alcohol is a kind of marker of sociality and that habit comes with some types of benefits”.
It was never about the drinking. It was about the social capital, the connections, the confidence built through communal experience. The alcohol was just... there.
If you’ve ever felt anxious about whether you’re drinking too much or too little, whether you ordered the “right” drink, whether you should justify that second glass or explain why you’re stopping at one—you’re not alone. The entire cultural conversation has been designed to make you feel this way.
This is the social messaging that has seen New Zealand’s alcohol consumption per capita drop by 30% since the mid-1980s. And as for the latest edition of wellness-washed ‘least harmful choice’ claims? The gin and tonic can sit right alongside these choices:
Mezcal neat — because agave is a vegetable, and vegetables are good for you. Definitely healthier than a salt-rimmed Margarita while stress-eating fried chicken at midnight.
Single malt whisky — rich in antioxidants from all that oak barrel aging. Far superior to whisky and Coke with self-loathing on the side.
Vodka soda with fresh lime — basically a vitamin C supplement at this point. Much more virtuous than vodka Red Bull at 2am when you’re already three bad decisions deep.
Garibaldi — you’re practically doing a juice cleanse. The citrus aids digestion, restores electrolytes. Infinitely healthier than tequila slammers followed by a kebab and the certainty you’ll nail karaoke tonight.
Champagne — the bubbles aid digestion, darling.
Negroni — taken for the botanicals of course, and definitely not three Negronis deep and texting your ex.
The quinine in tonic exists in such infinitesimal amounts it couldn’t ward off a particularly lazy mosquito. But the mozzie will make the effort for the added sugar in your bloodstream. You’d need roughly forty G&Ts to get anywhere near a therapeutic dose for leg cramps, at which point you’d have far bigger problems than your calves.
The Myths That Let Us Ignore Context
We fixate on the contents of the glass because it’s easier than examining why and where we’re holding it. So we tell ourselves stories:
“White spirits are easier on your body.” No. The reason you feel better after vodka than red wine isn’t purity—it’s the absence of congeners, those flavour compounds that can contribute to hangovers. But you know what contributes more to hangovers? Drinking too much.
“The quinine in tonic water is good for you.” If you’re drinking G&Ts for health benefits, you’re essentially trying to prevent malaria while giving yourself liver disease. The colonial-era antimalarial properties have been diluted into marketing copy, not medicine.
“Red wine is good for your heart.” The resveratrol debate. Yes, there are compounds in red wine that show promise in laboratory conditions. There are also compounds that are literally poison, which is why your liver works overtime. The “Mediterranean diet” studies that made red wine look beneficial were never able to separate the wine from everything else—the social eating, the vegetables, the olive oil, the walking, the not being chronically stressed. Correlation isn’t causation, and “moderate” means less than most people think.
Welcome to the wellness wash.
We do it with chocolate milk after workouts (perfect protein-to-carb ratio! Never mind you’ve consumed more sugar than you burned). We do it with green juice cleanses (detoxifying enzymes! Ignore the stripped fiber and fruit-punch sugar levels trying to do a job your body does naturally). We do it with kombucha (gut health! Don’t think about how some brands contain more alcohol and sugar than light beer).
The pattern is always the same: isolate one beneficial component, ignore all context, declare something “healthy,” and give yourself permission to over-consume while feeling virtuous.
But this thinking is particularly dangerous with alcohol because the context we’re ignoring is often the thing actually harming us.
What Context Actually Means
The most dangerous drinking isn’t the messy nights or dramatic binges. It’s the kind of drinking that doesn’t feature meaningful connection, and only offers escape.
”Mate, have you got time for a beer?” Recent studies show that solitary drinking is strongly associated with increased risk of alcohol use disorder and negative health outcomes, even after controlling for the amount consumed. The problem isn’t drinking alone occasionally—it’s drinking because you’re alone. Or being alone because you’re drinking. The context reveals the pattern, and the pattern reveals the problem.
Meanwhile, research on Mediterranean drinking patterns has often been used to justify that glass or two of red wine. It often ignores the most important part of why the Mediterranean way seem to work—it’s characterised by moderate wine consumption with meals, spread throughout the week, and accompanied by food. And again: this pattern occurs within a broader Mediterranean lifestyle that includes social meals and strong community connection
It’s not the wine. It’s the table. The people around it. The food, conversation, music, laughter, ritual of shared experience. Okay, that bit might be about the wine.
During the pandemic, alcohol sales went through the roof - but research has revealed that when young heavy drinkers lost access to social drinking contexts, their alcohol consumption and related problems decreased substantially—not because alcohol became less available, but because the social context changed. Without bars and parties, drinking lost its social scaffolding. What remained was just the drinking, and many people realised they didn’t actually want it.
This is why the International Academy of Wine’s 2025 statement to the UN matters: “It is dangerous to reduce wine to a health risk, because this overlooks its cultural, social, and human dimensions.”
They’re right, even if they have commercial interests. The WHO’s stance that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption is technically accurate from a pure health perspective, but it flattens something important: the difference between drinking embedded in social connection and drinking as a substitute for it.
Social connection itself—independent of alcohol—is what drives wellbeing and longevity. The Mediterranean pattern works not because of the wine, but because it’s embedded in a culture of genuine human connection.
Remember, that’s the fun bit. The laughing, the shared experiences, the awakening of the senses. Whether wine, whisky or agua fresca—liquid refreshment with friends and family is essential to good health.
What Actually Matters (And What Doesn’t)
Remember when drinking was allowed to be fun? Not optimised, not justified, not measured against health metrics—just fun. Somewhere between “gin prevents malaria” and “no amount is safe,” we lost permission to simply enjoy a drink with people we like. That’s what needs to come back.
If you’re going to drink, the only thing that matters is ‘are you present?’ Are you connected? Are you having the kind of fun you’ll remember, not the kind you’ll need to forget?
The drinking that doesn’t hurt you is presence, not absence. Connection, not escape. It’s about the conversation that makes you think differently, the music that makes you feel something, the food that anchors the experience in pleasure rather than intoxication.
And bloody hell, when did you last see an alcohol brand that was genuinely expressing this fun without resorting to day-glo RTD cans? The booze barons need to remember this too: drinks need joy, not just health monitoring and whisky wank. Let there be laughter and frolicking (it is possible in moderation, you know!). Let there be festivals and flavours and the kind of fun the term ‘social lubrication’ was inspired from.
The healthiest drinking choice isn’t about antioxidants or congeners or which spirit your liver prefers. It’s choosing a way of drinking that enhances your connection to life and other people. And crucially, it’s about preserving your ability to choose not to drink at all. And for that also to be fun. Because if the social connection is there—the laughter, the conversation, the shared experience—the drink becomes optional. And that’s when you know you’re doing it right.
The language we use around alcohol matters because it shapes how we think about our relationship with it. Calling a gin and tonic “least harmful” isn’t just reductive—it’s actively combative. It gives us permission to ignore the context, the patterns, the creeping dependencies. It lets us pretend optimisation is the same as examination. But it also takes the fun out of gin, which didn’t really need any help with that. Oh wait—that’s another myth. Gin doesn’t make you sad. Drinking badly makes you sad.
If you’ve ever felt anxious about drinking the “right” amount or the “right” way, this cultural conversation has failed you. Your choice of drink has never mattered as your motivation in reaching for it. And good ol’ healthy fun is perfectly acceptable motivation too.
So here’s your permission slip: drink what you like, with people who make you laugh, in moments that matter. The gin doesn’t need to prevent anything. The wine doesn’t need antioxidants. You don’t need to justify the second glass or explain stopping at one.
The only measure that matters is whether you’re drinking with your life or drinking at it. Whether you’re there for the connection or the escape. Whether tomorrow you’ll remember the conversation or need to apologise for it.
That’s it. That’s the whole guide.
The best part was never what was in the glass. It was always the people around it.