Middle-Aged Brits Are Pre-Gaming and Bar-Hopping as Much as Their Kids Are

Don Draper may have looked sophisticated with the bar cart in his Madison Avenue office and his stylized 60s-era suits, but if you think about it, he drank a lot like a well-off frat brother. And that is precisely the finding of a new study published in the journal Addiction: Middle-aged drinkers—at least those in Britain, over the age of 35—drink pretty much like a bunch of wild teenagers.

According to The Telegraph, which reported on the results, the study was carried out by the UK's University of Sheffield Alcohol and Research Group. The findings are based on drinking diaries completed by 90,000 British adults.

Pre-gaming? Check. Extreme bar-hopping that ends with deep feelings of remorse and a pair of flip-flops that aren't actually yours? Check.

The participants turned out to be just as likely to drink in multiple locations over an evening as teenagers and those in their 20's. In fact, 23 percent of those questioned said that in the previous week they had been out drinking in multiple locations.

Even worse was when they stayed in their own dorms—oops, we mean in their own homes. The study found that occasions like dinner parties or house parties led to even more excessive drinking, with nearly half of such events resulting in "increased or higher-risk drinking." God save the Queen's gaggle of corgis!

Dr. John Holmes, the lead researcher, had this to say: "When we looked at this in more detail, it seemed that people were pre-loading and post-loading." Been there, done that.

OK, maybe there are some differences in the way British codgers and their progeny drink: "For those in middle-age, it's probably not drinking before going out and tearing up the town, but it leads to them consuming the same amount as younger age groups, which obviously affects their health long-term if they're doing it regularly," Holmes said.

According to the study, a full 10 percent of all drinking occasions in Britain involve individuals consuming on average 14 units of alcohol. That is the equivalent of seven pints of beer or one and a half bottles of wine. This substantial amount of alcohol, the study found, is typically consumed by groups of friends moving between drinking in the home and the pub.

Somebody better let The Fresh Prince know that it looks like parents do in fact understand—at least when it comes to getting utterly shitfaced.