Tory Shepherd: Safe number of alcoholic drinks is now 10 a week – but who’s going to stick to that?

Doctors say more than 10 alcoholic drinks a week isn’t safe – but who’s going to stick to that? The big problem is there are heaps of good reasons.

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PUT down your eggnog, pour out that beer. Hell, you might even have to lay off the brandy butter this Christmas.

The health wonks – after one too many green smoothies, probably – have declared that Australians should stick to just 10 drinks a week. That’s four down from the current advice to have no more than 14 (in a week).

It was two a day. Now it’s less than that. Just when I’d invested in a special handbag that fits a goonbag inside.

And no more than four drinks on any one day. In my family we’d knock that over before the first Christmas cracker is popped. How else would you convince grown humans to put silly paper crowns on their heads?

How else would you get a laugh out of cracker jokes? (Why didn’t the skeleton go to the Christmas party? Because he had no body to go with!).

And let us not forget that the limits are for standard drinks, which as we all know is about a thimbleful of spirits or a pony of beer (do those even still exist?). That means splitting a bottle of wine with mates is flirting with disaster.

We all know pregnant women shouldn’t drink. Or kids. We know how deadly stupid it is to drive drunk (even if it’s just an electric scooter). But they’re gradually turning off the tap for everyone.

The National Health and Medical Research Council says they’re not telling you what to drink. They’re just telling you the risks of going over their ridiculously low bar.

OK, fine. There are risks. And not just risks of the “oh dear I forgot I was wearing a G-string under my short skirt when I decided to show off my limbo prowess at the staff party” kind.

There are all the literal and metaphysical car crash risks.

But also, alcohol calories stack up quickly, and obesity is a deadly epidemic in this country. Alcohol can feed into cycles of anxiety and depression.

It increases your risk of head, neck, esophageal, liver, and bowel cancer. That’s a lot of cancers.

Your risk of breast cancer increases the more you drink. “Every extra drink per day increases your risk of breast cancer by 8 per cent,” NHMRC spokeswoman Professor Kate Conigrave said.

Which goes to show she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There’s no way my risk of cancer is 123 per cent. Is there?

It can stuff up your liver, so your loved ones watch as you turn yellow with jaundice, as your brain slowly pickles and your body shuts down.

Crikey. It’s enough to make you want a drink.