Asking for a friend …

We just can’t win nowadays. Red meat gives us cancer, our cell phones are presumably melting our brains and alcohol turns our livers into pockmarked booze bags. We can cut out the red meat but the coping mechanism is drinking, and that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. With that being said, which is actually worse for us: Daily moderate drinking or weekend binge drinking?

Of course, there's a fundamental difference between the two. Binge drinking is drinking an inhuman amount of booze on one particular day, and drinking every day is … drinking everyday.

Let’s look at both.

Binge Drinking

The results of a study conducted by the University of Rochester highlights the extreme consequences of binge drinking. Over the course of a month, as explained by Men’s Health: “researchers fed mice the human equivalent of two drinks every day for seven days, or seven drinks two days in a row, in an attempt to simulate regular moderate drinking and weekend binge drinking. At the end of that month, levels of LDL cholesterol—the bad, artery-clogging kind—were 19 percent higher among the “binge drinking” mice compared to a control (sober) group of mice. The moderate-drinking mice actually had lower levels of LDL cholesterol than the sober mice.”

Hmm, okay. Sounds fairly terrible and whatnot. What about daily drinking?

Daily Drinking

A study performed at the University of Southampton found that long-term daily drinking-rather—than sporadic binge drinking—was a much greater risk factor for developing alcohol-related liver diseases. The researchers postulate that a daily drinker would decrease his or her risk of liver disease by sticking to a weekly schedule including three alcohol-free days.

So which is it, doc?

Apparently both. Or neither if you want to look at it that way. It seems like regardless of your abusive drinking style, you’re fucked either way.

Long-term heavy alcohol consumption has been consistently linked to an increased risk of cancer of the mouth, bowel, liver, prostate and breast. Not to mention the effects on the brain including memory loss and diminished learning capacity. When it comes specifically to heart diseases, the risk associated with alcohol increases exponentially, therefore doubling your alcohol intake does a far greater amount of damage to the heart, according to a report by ABC.

"It's like telling somebody that's just been run over by drunk driver [that] it's not as bad as liver cirrhosis," explained Professor Allsop, director of the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University.

Meaning essentially I could develop cirrhosis of the liver and subsequently Wernicke–Korsakoff Syndrome and die on the sofa watching ‘Murder She Wrote’ or I could make a lifetime of bad decisions in one drunken Saturday night while feeding my Freudian Id more and more Mad Dog 20/20. Either way, I’m essentially walking dead.

Flip a coin, chug a beer, go straightedge says science. Who knows? Like a hot turd rolling down a hill, all bets are off on what happens next. The choice is yours, young grasshopper…