On the other hand, why do you think we gave up the hunter/gatherer life style?
Cultivating grapes for wine and grain for beer was the origin of civilization!
I hate that alcohol, such an obvious health detriment, is so ingrained in culture that people don't even question it... Your link makes it worse!
Like the link points out, we were drinking before we had written language.
It's a matter of dealing with life on life's terms. The reality is that people like drinking. Sometimes people drink too much, and a few unlucky folks can't drink anything without risking death.
I ocne read a story about a Vietnam era war correspondent. He was a pacifist before going to cover combat and seeing combat up close made him hate war even more.
At one point a publisher asks him to contribute an article that 'deglamorizes war.'
He wrote back that deglamorizing war would be as easy as deglamorizing sex.
Let's fire up a peace pipe with tobacco then!
/j
Cool, let's. /nj
With one important difference: Wine was often diluted back then and beer was not as strong as it is today, so it was much less dangerous on the whole, and it was so weak that even children drank it instead of the terrible water of the time. Though they also drank water when it was good.
Less strong, but since they drank beer instead of water overall consumption was higher. Lots of people should still drink less though.
Yeah! It was seen as an everyday good feeling healthy thing back then and not just something to get wasted on, though that happened a lot too. I'd take the ancient mindset of moderation over today's alcohol addicted society anyday.
Not sure it was so much about good feeling. From what I read it was more about booze being less likely to grant you a plague debuff than water back in the days.
Thankfully we haven't progressed since then!
Damn, glad I quit drinking.
(Hits vape pen.)
(/s, just in case it wasn't clear.)
Glad I quit drinking and am currently quitting the vape pens.
Had to do a double take with that image, the last time I saw it was in the instructions for how to use a menstrual cup. 😳
I've been working on fully cutting out alcohol from my diet. I tried for years but I think I am finally succeeding. Haven't had a drink in almost two months.
Great work dude, keep it up 💪
Life is the number one cause of death.
Gotta go sometime and I’d rather do it having enjoyed a little bit of wine
They also found that drinking raises the risk of:
...sexually transmitted infections
This statement really made we wonder if they thought about actual causality at all.
Stop. Fucking. Your. Beer. Bottles.
From a summary:
Drinking damages the liver and may make the body more vulnerable to infectious diseases, including sexually transmitted infections and tuberculosis.
Or from the review itself:
Infectious disease
The causal impact of alcohol on the four broad categories of infectious disease from the last Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health [1] has been confirmed in recent reviews [15, 16]. The main biological mechanism involves alcohol-induced liver dysfunction, which disrupts both non-specific innate and adaptive immune responses through acute and chronic alcohol consumption [80-84]. Lowered immune responses increase susceptibility to communicable diseases. More specific biological pathways are described in the references listed in Table 1.
While all of this is true and concerning, now is not the time to raw dog reality.
Doing weed is also bad for me. It got me quite severe health effects that I'm dealing with right now.
I'm not regretting it for a second and the second my issues are under control I'll use weed again (in much lower doses) because living in the raw reality right now just makes you depressed and suicidal. I'm m neither, and I'll contribute that happily to pot, it made life nice again for a few years
Right? What's to stop one from interpreting these results as "alcohol will get you off of this dogshit timeline sooner"?
I’ll drink to that
Welp. cracks open another one
My dad worked on a project that could have made him and his colleague probably very rich (at least, it was successfully done to great wealth by someone else many years later) but his colleague had problems with alcohol, drunk called the investors and whatever he said made them pull out such that they had to cancel the project.
His drinking got worse from there for him and he spent years in and out of prison. When I was about to go to college and my dad was meeting him after he got back out he took me aside and strictly warned me not to go crazy drinking in college. I truthfully told him that I don’t drink at all and I guess that was inconceivable to him because he started going, “You WILL drink. EVERYBODY drinks. Don’t lie and…” so on so forth.
It never seemed appealing to me what with seeing people ruin their lives and act foolish, the odor, all the money people spend on it etc. I’m sure the taste is fine if you push through and try it a bunch but from seeing the effects I never wanted to. Meanwhile visiting other people’s houses as a kid my friends would be doing stuff like asking his mom if he could sniff her wineglass at dinner. 💀
It's the cause of 100% of my arguments and misunderstandings, haha.
Eh, I quit a few years ago. When you have to have conversations with yourself about it, it’s time. So cold turkey I went, luckily NBD for me. The only time I miss it is after a really trying, long day; or I’m just craving flavors that aren’t sugary drinks like soda. I don’t like sweet drinks very much. Alcohol lends an intensity to flavors that’s impossible to replicate.
Looking back at it I’m really glad I quit.
Anyway, hopefully added years/stopped shaving years off my life. We’ll see.
I don't know how someone who grew up around people who drinked could have any other perception of alcohol than as poison. I don't know a single person who drinks regularly who doesn't have health conditions directly linked to it.
"Poison is bad for you."
That analysis statistically was terrible and the title is disingenuous and misrepresents the data set.
A review of the relationship between dimensions of alcohol consumption and the burden of disease: 2026 update including Mendelian randomisation studies https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.70435
cause
attributable
What now?
Slow motion suicide.
Alcohol’s a helluva drug.
Older males in my family were all diabetic by my age. The main difference between us? I don't drink wine with my meals. Idk if that's a coincidence, but it makes me wonder.
Yep, it sucks. But it turns out there's a non-stop drip of terrible fucking news, the planet continues to get hotter with more wildfires every year, my well-paying career in software might be soon over due to the advent of AI coding, I'm working for the worst company I have ever worked for and with one of the worst bosses I've ever seen, the president is getting shows critical of him cancelled in order to approve sales of all major media platforms to his fascist friends (and fail sons), the cost of everything is skyrocketing, social security looks likely to collapse before I can ever collect it, and there does not appear to be any relief in sight for any of this.
Maybe I don't need to go old and healthy at 80+.
It's obvious that drinking isn't good for you, but it was just as obvious that smoking isn't good for you and that didn't keep my grandparents from doing it until it killed them — and nicotine barely gives you any buzz at all. We all gotta go some time.
consider it this way: getting old may suck. getting old, sick and having strokes sucks way more and just makes you miserable and a burden to a bunch of people who didnt deserve it. you wont be taking it out your enemy. just hurting yourself and finding more reasons to hate yourself.
Its either you get the diseases getting drunk or get the diseases sober but from unregulated food industry.
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind