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To answer this question, first of all, we have to look quickly at how the labelling of low/no drinks works.
What is ABV?
We measure the strength of an alcoholic drink in ABV.
ABV stands for Alcohol by Volume and simply refers to the percentage of your drink that is pure alcohol.
So in a 5% beer, for example, 5% of the liquid in your pint is pure alcohol, and the other 95% is water, hops, barley and any other ingredients the producer has added.
Alcohol-Free Drinks
Here in the UK, alcohol-free drinks are any drinks at or below 0.05% ABV.
But a lot of countries that we import our drinks from (including the US, Portugal, Germany & Belgium) allow products containing up to 0.5% ABV to be described as containing no alcohol.
That’s 10 x more alcohol per drink.
So, Should You Be Worried?
In short, no.
While 0.5% drinks are 10x higher than those made domestically and labelled as alcohol-free, they still don’t contain enough alcohol to get you drunk.
How do we know?
Well, in a German study in 2012, 67 adults who had been asked to abstain from alcohol for 5 days were each given 1.5 litres of 0.4% beer to drink over the course of an hour.
The researchers tested their blood throughout the hour, and the highest their Blood Alcohol Concentration reached was still around 70x lower than the level at which most people start to feel the minor effects of alcohol.
Since then, continued research has looked into 0.5% drinks, and all of it has so far found (to the best of my knowledge and research) that there is no notable physiological effect on the healthy adult body from 0.5% drinks.
Why Don’t They Get Me Drunk?
Your body is a pretty awesome place.
And while alcohol is treated as a toxin that needs immediate removal, your metabolism works fast enough that a 0.5% drink gets processed and removed long before it has any chance to get you even the slightest bit tiddled.
Is There Anyone Who Should Avoid A 0.5% Drink?
If your reasons for avoiding alcohol are medical, such as an allergy, or religious, then by all means give them a wide berth.
And of course, for those who are in recovery from alcohol addiction, these drinks can be an amazing tool to manage cravings, but for some people, they can also be a trigger, so please speak to your support network first.
But for everyone else, there’s absolutely no reason to be wary of a 0.5% drink.
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