It's the cause of 100% of my arguments and misunderstandings, haha.
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
The problem with meta analysis of epidemiology is that so much epidemiology is shit, by flunkee MDs, that meta analysis just concludes data is mostly shit.
Of course it's a toxin. Even a few drinks induces ataxia by toxifying the cerebellum.
Alcohol’s a helluva drug.
Gotta go sometime and I’d rather do it having enjoyed a little bit of wine
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. 😳
Left: wine glass with broken off foot.
Right: chess piece reveal party.
A cup? I usually just drink straight from the bottle
Slow motion suicide.
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.
Right on, it took some doing but I'm glad I quit nicotine. It's worth it!
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!
Thankfully we haven't progressed since then!
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
So you're telling me without alcohol I could have spent my life picking berries before I died of a toothache at 25? And instead I'm reading excel sheets and will die a prolonged death after years of chemo at 85?
Damn alcohol really is the cause of all my problems...
No one is forcing you to brush your teeth.
True, but its illegal for me to wander my neighborhood and pick berries from "private property"
Realistically, if you eat out of trash cans you'll have the same experience, and if you're quiet and neat, no one will report you.
Found the racoon
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.
Back when life expectancy was 45.
Popular misconception.
There were a lot of people who never made it out of childhood, which skews the average down.
But if you made it to adulthood, you had a pretty good chance of making it to 65 or so.
Good thing someone else did the work long ago, so I don't need to keep drinking it.
Well, I was thinking of dropping alcohol anyways.
Welp. cracks open another one
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.
That analysis statistically was terrible and the title is disingenuous and misrepresents the data set.
cause
attributable
What now?
Yup, cause implies mechanism, of which there is very little here, seems a lot more like correlation. Also, it's Harvard ~~nutrition~~ public health, which is, problematic.
Send this to Doug Ford, who has an agenda to keep everyone drunk, while he does not drink.
But, "Everything in moderation.", and "The dose makes the poison."
Go ahead and counter with this ancient "wisdom", then continue to drink. It's your body, you don't need to justify how you abuse it to anyone.
I am still waiting for someone to refudate this analysis. So far, I have yet to see one even close. It's one of the best I have seen.
https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2007.04.089
The most important statistic mentioned is light drinkers have a reduction in all-cause mortality compared to non-drinkers. While heavy drinkers or binge drinkers have an increase.
It's a critical statistic that all of these sensationalist headlines fail to account for or even analyze.
Heavy drinkers is not what you think it is. The effect of "light" drinkers is due to poor sampling effect of non drinkers, who are both rare and often have other health issues. Repeated studies show no amount of intake is beneficial.
IIRC that effect is more a result of bad categorization rather than light alcohol use actually being correlated with lower mortality.
People who used to be heavy drinkers and who have since quit get put in the "non drinkere" category, but because they used to drink heavily their mortality is still impacted even after they stop. You don't suddenly get a good liver after 10 years of tearing it apart after all.
So the "non-drinkers" category has an artificially worse mortality than the light drinkers.
At the end of the day the body breaks alcohol down into some carcinogens. No amount of that is good for you.
It's a decent argument but it's not supported in the data.
Now I am going to have to dig up that study from China. They had a sample size of over 1 million people with repeated blood draws, medical history and a full alcohol use history. It showed the same all-mortality curve for non-drinkers (never consumed) versus light drinkers.
What's interesting is heavy drinkers who quit reverted back close to the never consumed level after like 5 years.
I swear I had it saved to my zotero account but I can't find it. I will keep looking.
Bottom line: ethanol under the right dosage reduces cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The amount of reduction more than compensates for its risks of creating other diseases like cancer. However the negative effects of over-consumption make it unethical for any medical professional to recommend non-drinkers to start drinking. If you choose to drink, 1-2 drinks per day depending on sex and weight is the hard limit.
2 drinks a day is a heavy drinker.
The blood thinning effect of alcohol has been dismissed by several studies, it's a cause of many types of heart disease. The problem is people lie about intake, and the teetotlers and typically ex alcoholics.
Ethanol is a toxin, it effects mitochondrial efficiency at incredibly low levels. Huge risk factor for dementia.
Also be careful of regional studies like the large Chinese cohort because a lot of effects are due to genetics. Bad epidemiology had people convinced fish oil would would prevent heart disease because of one study in inuit that failed to consider genetics.
There is no safe amount of alcohol.
Speaking of terrible studies. The one you linked is absolutely terrible.
Have you read of the actual paper. Their conclusions are absolutely not supported by the evidence and their methodology is statistically invalid.
You're not wrong. From the study:
Most fully alcohol-attributable diseases require heavy drinking, either occasionally (e.g. alcohol poisoning) or chronically (most chronic disease categories linked to alcohol).
The way I read it, the commenter does not believe moderation prevents harm. Hence the "wisdom" in quotes. But they're for the freedom to self-"abuse."
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind