drinks v.s. beverages

[Eway]

"Both the beverage-drinking patterns and overall health of U.S. adults have changed considerably over the past several decades. In the 1970s, Americans got 6-8% of their daily calories from drinks, but today, 21% of their daily calories from beverages."

(from Healthy Beverage Guidelines)

Are drinks and beverages different things?

[Casiopea]

It's odd, isn't it? Here's what the dictionaries tell us:

drink (noun)
1. A liquid that is fit for drinking; a beverage.
5. Chiefly Southern U.S. (See soft drink).

What I understood from the author's usage was this. The words 'drinks' and 'beverages' are synonymous. Both refer to liquid fit for drinking. The word "beverages", however, adds a bit more meaning. It refers to a greater variety: the greater variety of drinks available today.

All the best.


All the best.

[queenbu]

Some dictionaries give 'beverage' as excluding water.

[Casiopea]

It's an interesting classification, beverage.

Note that, the author of Healthy Beverage Guidelines, Becky Hand, lists water as a beverage.

Healthy Beverage Guidelines for Adults

Level 1: Water

Level 2: Unsweetened Coffee and Unsweetened Teas

Level 3: Low-Fat (1%) or Skim (fat-free) Milk and Unsweetened/Fortified Soymilk,

and so on...

[BobK]

In BE, there was a very influential article about U and Non-U language (a classification coined by Professor Alan Ross in 1954). It defined some words as U (socially acceptable in middle/upper-middle class England) and others as non-U (not). So aspirational parents required their children to say 'Excuse me' (U) rather than the more common (at the time) 'Beg pardon - which was non-U; in fact, they probably called it Common.
U and non-U English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

According to this odious, but quite effective, sort of socio-linguistic engineering, 'beverage' was a non-U word; U people said 'drink'.

John Betjeman wrote a poem almost entirely in non-U language: vers libre [free verse] - How To Get On In Society - John Betjeman

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