Drinking too much can damage your physical and mental health in the short and long term. As well as affecting your weight, looks and sleep, heavy drinking can lead to a wide range of medical conditions including high blood pressure, liver disease, strokes, cancers and brain damage.

Alcohol and units

Recommended safe limits are:

Women: 2-3 units per day, up to 14 per week

Men: 3-4 units per day, up to 21 per week

We all need at least 2 days a week without alcohol.

The DrinkAware website has an online unit calculator where you can select the drink brand, enter the number of drinks and it will work out the total number of units.

If you get to know the unit content of your usual drinks then you can keep track of how much you're drinking so you are more likely to know when you've had too much.

Calculating units

Although by law the alcohol strength (%ABV) of bottles and canned drinks must be shown on the label, unfortunately not all drinks manufacturers print the unit content on their packaging.

There is a misconception that 1 drink equals 1 unit. But this isn't true because the strength of drinks varies so much and measures also vary - a large glass of wine in a restaurant contains a third of a bottle and drinks poured at home tend to be much more generous than standard pub measures. This makes the unit content tricky to work out but this is how to do it.

Multiply the volume of the drink by the %ABV (alcohol by volume), then divide by 1000.

For example, a bottle of wine (750ml) at 12% ABV would be:

750ml x 12% ABV = 9000

9000 ÷ 1000 = 9 units