Beer consumption has remained fairly stable in the last 10 years in Canada, according to Statistics Canada. (CBC)

More Americans say they're pushing aside their beer steins, but the rate of alcohol-related disorders has remained steady, U.S. researchers said Wednesday.

The team concluded Americans are drinking much less beer, more wine and about the same amount of hard liquor, based on their analysis of 50 years of data from the Framingham heart study.

More people also said they were non-drinkers, the researchers reported in the August issue of the American Journal of Medicine.

The study suggested those born later in the 20th century drink more moderately than previous generations, and that people tend to drink less as they get older.

Despite the downward trend for beer consumption, the risk of alcohol dependence did not decrease, the researchers said.

The proportion of people who developed alcohol-related disorders, such as alcoholic cardiomyopathy or cirrhosis, stayed about the same across all age groups.

"While these data suggest the development of more favourable patterns of alcohol consumption over the latter part of the 20th century, they also show that, at the same time, the cumulative incidence of alcohol use disorders has not shown a decrease, and continuing efforts at preventing them are warranted," Yuqing Zhang of the Boston University school of medicine and his colleagues concluded.

In 2007, Statistics Canada reported that the amount of beer consumed was similar to that of a decade earlier, but Canadians were drinking more wine and spirits. Consumption reached a record of 14.6 litres per person for Canadians aged 15 years and older in 2007, up almost 46 per cent compared with 1997.

The Canadian statistics do not include homemade alcohol, wine and beer brewed on the premises, or contraband alcohol.

Dr. Norman Giesbrecht at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto said young Canadians admit to drinking more at one sitting, which suggests the message isn't getting through.

The population-based study in the U.S. recruited subjects who were born between 1900 and 1959 in Framingham, Mass. It may not be representative of the whole population of the U.S., said Giesbrecht.