18 ms·

There's No 'Safe' Level of Alcohol Consumption, Global Study Finds

68 points by elijahparker 8y ago

johnmoberg 8y ago
I think it's clear that alcohol consumption is a burden on society, but I think the headline exaggerates matters a bit. The relative risk is only 0.5% greater at one standard drink per day, relative to no alcohol consumption (see figure 5 in the paper.)
- refurb 8y ago
  Articles like this tend to leave it at “your risk of death increases” without providing any sense as to what the magnitude of the increase is - without that its impossible to just the benefit-risk tradeoff. A major pet peeve of mine.
  - commandlinefan 8y ago
    Especially since your risk of death increases every time you get out of bed in the morning. Pass the vodka!
  - leekyle333 8y ago
    Population studies seem to be pretty useless unless there is a massive effect ie smoking. .05 increased relative risk was the same for the red meat colon cancer paper.
- eastern 8y ago
  The press release says this: comparing no drinks with one drink a day the risk of developing one of the 23 alcohol-related health problems was 0.5% higher — meaning 914 in 100,000 15–95 year olds would develop a condition in one year if they did not drink, but 918 people in 100,000 who drank one alcoholic drink a day would develop an alcohol-related health problem in a year. There's a good analysis at https://medium.com/wintoncentre/the-risks-of-alcohol-again-2ae8cb006a4a https://medium.com/wintoncentre/the-risks-of-alcohol-again-2...
  - charlesdm 8y ago
    One drink -- is that one glass of wine? Or is that one alcohol unit? One glass of wine a day might seem fine to some, and outrageous to others. With the amount of literature being written about how many units a week is still considered "ok", I wouldn't mind getting a clearer understand of how much is too much.
    - cjlars 8y ago
      It's at one 'alcohol unit', defined as 10g of pure ethanol. For comparison a standard 355ml can of 4.2% ABV beer (e.g. Bud Light) contains just under 12g of pure ethanol. A 5% ABV can would be closer to 15g. So the unit of measure they're using is bit smaller than what most people think of as 'one drink'.
robbick 8y ago
A brilliant excerpt from the end of the bbc article[0]: Yet Prof David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, sounded a note of caution about the findings. "Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said. "There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving. "Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention." [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45283401 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45283401
- lcfcjs2 8y ago
  Great comment. This is very true. People who drive cars are more likely to die from injuries than people who stay at home.
- marak830 8y ago
  "Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention." I think I have found my new motto :-)
  - base698 8y ago
    "Never take life too seriously, no one gets out alive."
  - mattnewport 8y ago
    It's a vaguely amusing line but it doesn't actually make any sense in context.
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      It's a spiritual generalization of the statement "There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving." and thus it seems relevant to the context (and does make sense), not as a rational argument, but as a figure of speech to emphasize author's opinion about the subject.
jacknews 8y ago
I haven't read the study, but going by the reporting, they are conflating different statistics, those of the direct health impact of alcohol, and those of the 'behavioral' impact (which may then have health effects). No doubt there is an increased risk of death, due to alcohol, through drunk-driving (either as perp or victim), street violence and so on. But many of those problems stem from a small percentage of people, or the small percentage of occasions, when it is consumed in excess. I think what people want to know are the direct health risks of alcohol, in various amounts.
- DanBC 8y ago
  Those are health risks of alcohol. People need to know all cause mortality.
  - jacknews 8y ago
    It is an interesting statistic for the whole of society, but most individuals want to know the direct health impact of alcohol separate from the all-cause impact. The headline is misleading - it should say 'there is no safe level of alcohol for the good of society' or something similar. And it is even wrong - if it was possible to limit how much anyone could consume in a day, many of the 'behavioral' risks would go away, and we'd be left with the health risks only.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      Well, sure, but this is true even of the more direct health risks. Alcohol increases risks of many different types of cancer. We want to reduce the rates of cancer across a population, so we ask people to drink less. But what's my particular risk of cancer from alcohol? We have no way of saying. And even if alcohol doubles my risk, if the risk was small to begin with does it matter that it's doubled?
- QasimK 8y ago
  The study does break it down (pages 7-8 of the PDF) into various categories including a lot of individual diseases, transport injuries, self-harm, violence, alcohol-use disorders, and even on the other side, the health benefits. The direct health risks, i.e. diseases, assuming you can insulate yourself from the risk of self-harm, unintentional injuries, and other people, can be read off the graph... Barely. However, this is by age and not by amount of drinking.
frank_s 8y ago
One of the good points about alcohol (there aren't many): It is a strong anxiolytic and is readily available 'over the counter' which means people can self-medicate themselves in times of crisis. How many lives has that saved? Most medical studies tell you significantly more about the prejudices of the authors and/or who paid for the study. This one seems no different in that regard. I have an interest in the matter being an alcoholic myself. A more interesting study would be on the degree of contempt we're held in by the medical profession at large. RIP. Ian Murdock.
- thebigspacefuck 8y ago
  What's the risk of anxiety if not medicated in a time of crisis? Tetsubo cardiomyopathy? A lost night of sleep? Personally I haven't drank in years and have managed my anxiety just fine through other means. It's also a depressant and can make you feel worse. Some of the worst anxiety I've had is after a night of drinking. There's nothing like waking up in a pool of your own vomit after drinking alone and having every regrettable action before you blacked out come back to you from the night before. Thankfully I sleep on my side, but how many lives has that taken?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- thatsamonad 8y ago
  > people can self-medicate themselves in times of crisis. I cringe reading that as a child of parents who spent their lives self-medicating through drugs and alcohol rather than seeking outside help... > How many lives has that saved? I don’t know how many it’s saved, but I can tell you that it’s severely damaged and nearly ruined the lives of at least a handful of innocent bystanders.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    There's a big difference between having a beer after a hard day at work and actual alcohol dependency. One is harmless (and possible harm-reducing), the other destroys lives and relationships. We need to be able to differentiate between the two without conflating them.
raffael-vogler 8y ago
> The three leading causes of attributable deaths in this age group were tuberculosis (1·4% [95% UI 1·0–1·7] of total deaths), road injuries (1·2% [0·7–1·9]), and self-harm (1·1% [0·6–1·5]). TBC is still an infectious disease and road injuries are preventable by simply not driving after having had a drink and self-harm is rather unlikely after a bottle of beer. > and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. That is a triviality. Alcohol has no health benefits. --- Seems to me that it is okay to have a drink a day.
- vilhelm_s 8y ago
  It's not a triviality. The background is that there have been quite a few studied published which claimed that drinking moderately had health benefits over not drinking at all (you see those headlines every now and then, "a glass of wine/week reduces risk of heart attack", or whatever). The statistics behind those studies are a bit dodgy, because they investigate just one disease (heart attacks, say) instead of total health effect, and because they are confounded by people who are tee-totalers because they were alcoholics (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-give-me-breast-cancer/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-gi...). But many people say that they have a big negative impact on public health, because they allow people to rationalize their drinking---instead of thinking it's unhealthy they can go "oh, but it's good for my heart".
  - raffael-vogler 8y ago
    As far as I know those studies have been falsified by at least one large meta-study (f.x. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26997174 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26997174) which revealed that those studies (showing benefits of moderate alcohol consumption) are based on a sampling bias. Those studies compare a group N of people who never drink with a group O of people who occasionally drink. Group N usually shows slightly more health issues than group O - hence the conclusion. But the problem is simply that there are reasons why people decide to abstain completely from alcohol. And those reasons are often health issues or problems with alcohol in the past. From that angle it is a triviality. Alcohol is mildly toxic to almost all organs - of course maximizing health will be achieved by avoiding it entirely.
kartan 8y ago
I would like that people saw this as a reality check to another promoted narrative. "Sometimes, beer loves us back too: Studies have suggested that, when consumed in moderation, beer has many health benefits." - http://www.foxnews.com/story/2010/01/15/healthy-beer-drinking.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/2010/01/15/healthy-beer-drinkin... "Despite the health benefits of moderate drinking, Holahan emphasizes the need for common sense. One or two drinks a day may be beneficial for some, but drinking a lot more can be dangerous, he said." - https://news.utexas.edu/2010/08/27/psychology_drinking https://news.utexas.edu/2010/08/27/psychology_drinking One in Five Americans Say Moderate Drinking Is Healthy - https://news.gallup.com/poll/184382/one-five-americans-say-moderate-drinking-healthy.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/184382/one-five-americans-say-m... So there is still people believing that alcohol may be healthy. It is good to understand that it is not. And that to decide to drink will have consequences. I have seen an increase of availability of alcohol-free drinks for the past decade that allow you to hang out with your friends, keeping that very needed human contact, but allowing you to not suffer the adverse effects of alcohol and to drive safe home.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Just want to point out that in many countries public transport is such that to „drive safe home“ is not a consideration.
  - kartan 8y ago
    Yes, you are completely right. Going Friday night back home in Stockholms tunnelbana can fully confirm this. :)
- topmonk 8y ago
  > So there is still people believing that alcohol may be healthy. It is good to understand that it is not. And that to decide to drink will have consequences. From the article: What's more, any protective health effects of alcohol were offset by the drink's risk, including strong links between alcohol consumption and the risk of cancer and injuries such as those resulting from car accidents. It depends, though. If your family has a high risk of cancer, but a low risk of diabetes or heart problems (or if you drink and drive), then alcohol will probably increase your risk. However, if your family has a low risk of cancer, and a higher risk of heart disease, maybe you'd be better off drinking a little.
mattnewport 8y ago
Having stopped drinking a bit over a year ago I'm curious if I'll actually recover from some of the damaging health effects or just not get any worse. I recall reading that for smoking your chance of dying returns to normal about 10 years after quitting but I'm not sure if there is similar research for drinking
HelloNurse 8y ago
This article is focused on average alcohol consumption. It only proves that if more alcohol is consumed there are more people who drink enough to have problems, not that everyone has problems.
cwyers 8y ago
The problem with this study is that all nutritional studies are unreliable, and the problem is getting worse. > These implausible estimates of benefits or risks associated with diet probably reflect almost exclusively the magnitude of the cumulative biases in this type of research, with extensive residual confounding and selective reporting.3 Almost all nutritional variables are correlated with one another; thus, if one variable is causally related to health outcomes, many other variables will also yield significant associations in large enough data sets. With more research involving big data, almost all nutritional variables will be associated with almost all outcomes. Moreover, given the complicated associations of eating behaviors and patterns with many time-varying social and behavioral factors that also affect health, no currently available cohort includes sufficient information to address confounding in nutritional associations. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social_jama&utm_term=1735239284&utm_content=followers-article_engagement-image_stock&utm_campaign=article_alert&linkId=55887642 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337?ut... Someone will come out two weeks from now and say booze makes you immortal.
Mikeb85 8y ago
The 'findings' of this study are so convoluted it's obvious they have an agenda. Yes, alcohol can cause dangerous behaviour and social problems. This doesn't mean there isn't a safe level of consumption, safe meaning such that the alcoholic drink itself doesn't harm your body. Also funny that they mention alcohol can decrease the occurrence of certain heart diseases (one of the largest killers) but that doesn't mean it's safe because it increases the rate of certain cancers (which kill less people than heart disease) so the conclusion is that it's not safe. Personally, I'll go with the fact that alcohol has been consumed for all of human history, the fact that many alcohol consuming cultures have longer life expectancy than some abstinent cultures (not proof in itself, but a 'good enough' observation for my own personal peace of mind), and the fact that I'd rather eat and drink well than gain what, an extra year or two of life? I'm healthy, not overweight, active, most of my ancestors in recent history lived to 90+ years old with sub-par diets and drinking habits, I'm not convinced ultra-healthy eating and abstinence is going to be worth the boredom.
archagon 8y ago
Coincidentally, I'm hoping to release a (simple) iOS app next week that will help keep your drinking under a preset weekly limit. Will automatically add your drinks as calories to HealthKit and pull recent check-ins from Untappd: https://i.imgur.com/MhJm6Si.png https://i.imgur.com/MhJm6Si.png As an avid craft beer fan, I've been trying to keep my drinking under 120g of pure alcohol a week (which is about 9 standard drinks) by way of a Calca spreadsheet over the past two years. It's been very effective, but a bit annoying to wrangle manually. Figured I'd finally turn it into an actual product. I think I'll probably release the code under GPL.

68 points by elijahparker 8y ago

I think it's clear that alcohol consumption is a burden on society, but I think the headline exaggerates matters a bit. The relative risk is only 0.5% greater at one standard drink per day, relative to no alcohol consumption (see figure 5 in the paper.)

refurb 8y ago
Articles like this tend to leave it at “your risk of death increases” without providing any sense as to what the magnitude of the increase is - without that its impossible to just the benefit-risk tradeoff. A major pet peeve of mine.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  Especially since your risk of death increases every time you get out of bed in the morning. Pass the vodka!
- leekyle333 8y ago
  Population studies seem to be pretty useless unless there is a massive effect ie smoking. .05 increased relative risk was the same for the red meat colon cancer paper.
eastern 8y ago
The press release says this: comparing no drinks with one drink a day the risk of developing one of the 23 alcohol-related health problems was 0.5% higher — meaning 914 in 100,000 15–95 year olds would develop a condition in one year if they did not drink, but 918 people in 100,000 who drank one alcoholic drink a day would develop an alcohol-related health problem in a year. There's a good analysis at https://medium.com/wintoncentre/the-risks-of-alcohol-again-2ae8cb006a4a https://medium.com/wintoncentre/the-risks-of-alcohol-again-2...
- charlesdm 8y ago
  One drink -- is that one glass of wine? Or is that one alcohol unit? One glass of wine a day might seem fine to some, and outrageous to others. With the amount of literature being written about how many units a week is still considered "ok", I wouldn't mind getting a clearer understand of how much is too much.
  - cjlars 8y ago
    It's at one 'alcohol unit', defined as 10g of pure ethanol. For comparison a standard 355ml can of 4.2% ABV beer (e.g. Bud Light) contains just under 12g of pure ethanol. A 5% ABV can would be closer to 15g. So the unit of measure they're using is bit smaller than what most people think of as 'one drink'.

robbick 8y ago

A brilliant excerpt from the end of the bbc article[0]: Yet Prof David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, sounded a note of caution about the findings. "Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said. "There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving. "Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention." [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45283401 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45283401

lcfcjs2 8y ago
Great comment. This is very true. People who drive cars are more likely to die from injuries than people who stay at home.
marak830 8y ago
"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention." I think I have found my new motto :-)
- base698 8y ago
  "Never take life too seriously, no one gets out alive."
- mattnewport 8y ago
  It's a vaguely amusing line but it doesn't actually make any sense in context.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    It's a spiritual generalization of the statement "There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving." and thus it seems relevant to the context (and does make sense), not as a rational argument, but as a figure of speech to emphasize author's opinion about the subject.

jacknews 8y ago

I haven't read the study, but going by the reporting, they are conflating different statistics, those of the direct health impact of alcohol, and those of the 'behavioral' impact (which may then have health effects). No doubt there is an increased risk of death, due to alcohol, through drunk-driving (either as perp or victim), street violence and so on. But many of those problems stem from a small percentage of people, or the small percentage of occasions, when it is consumed in excess. I think what people want to know are the direct health risks of alcohol, in various amounts.

DanBC 8y ago
Those are health risks of alcohol. People need to know all cause mortality.
- jacknews 8y ago
  It is an interesting statistic for the whole of society, but most individuals want to know the direct health impact of alcohol separate from the all-cause impact. The headline is misleading - it should say 'there is no safe level of alcohol for the good of society' or something similar. And it is even wrong - if it was possible to limit how much anyone could consume in a day, many of the 'behavioral' risks would go away, and we'd be left with the health risks only.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    Well, sure, but this is true even of the more direct health risks. Alcohol increases risks of many different types of cancer. We want to reduce the rates of cancer across a population, so we ask people to drink less. But what's my particular risk of cancer from alcohol? We have no way of saying. And even if alcohol doubles my risk, if the risk was small to begin with does it matter that it's doubled?
QasimK 8y ago
The study does break it down (pages 7-8 of the PDF) into various categories including a lot of individual diseases, transport injuries, self-harm, violence, alcohol-use disorders, and even on the other side, the health benefits. The direct health risks, i.e. diseases, assuming you can insulate yourself from the risk of self-harm, unintentional injuries, and other people, can be read off the graph... Barely. However, this is by age and not by amount of drinking.

frank_s 8y ago

One of the good points about alcohol (there aren't many): It is a strong anxiolytic and is readily available 'over the counter' which means people can self-medicate themselves in times of crisis. How many lives has that saved? Most medical studies tell you significantly more about the prejudices of the authors and/or who paid for the study. This one seems no different in that regard. I have an interest in the matter being an alcoholic myself. A more interesting study would be on the degree of contempt we're held in by the medical profession at large. RIP. Ian Murdock.

thebigspacefuck 8y ago
What's the risk of anxiety if not medicated in a time of crisis? Tetsubo cardiomyopathy? A lost night of sleep? Personally I haven't drank in years and have managed my anxiety just fine through other means. It's also a depressant and can make you feel worse. Some of the worst anxiety I've had is after a night of drinking. There's nothing like waking up in a pool of your own vomit after drinking alone and having every regrettable action before you blacked out come back to you from the night before. Thankfully I sleep on my side, but how many lives has that taken?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
thatsamonad 8y ago
> people can self-medicate themselves in times of crisis. I cringe reading that as a child of parents who spent their lives self-medicating through drugs and alcohol rather than seeking outside help... > How many lives has that saved? I don’t know how many it’s saved, but I can tell you that it’s severely damaged and nearly ruined the lives of at least a handful of innocent bystanders.
- freehunter 8y ago
  There's a big difference between having a beer after a hard day at work and actual alcohol dependency. One is harmless (and possible harm-reducing), the other destroys lives and relationships. We need to be able to differentiate between the two without conflating them.

raffael-vogler 8y ago

> The three leading causes of attributable deaths in this age group were tuberculosis (1·4% [95% UI 1·0–1·7] of total deaths), road injuries (1·2% [0·7–1·9]), and self-harm (1·1% [0·6–1·5]). TBC is still an infectious disease and road injuries are preventable by simply not driving after having had a drink and self-harm is rather unlikely after a bottle of beer. > and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. That is a triviality. Alcohol has no health benefits. --- Seems to me that it is okay to have a drink a day.

vilhelm_s 8y ago
It's not a triviality. The background is that there have been quite a few studied published which claimed that drinking moderately had health benefits over not drinking at all (you see those headlines every now and then, "a glass of wine/week reduces risk of heart attack", or whatever). The statistics behind those studies are a bit dodgy, because they investigate just one disease (heart attacks, say) instead of total health effect, and because they are confounded by people who are tee-totalers because they were alcoholics (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-give-me-breast-cancer/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-gi...). But many people say that they have a big negative impact on public health, because they allow people to rationalize their drinking---instead of thinking it's unhealthy they can go "oh, but it's good for my heart".
- raffael-vogler 8y ago
  As far as I know those studies have been falsified by at least one large meta-study (f.x. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26997174 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26997174) which revealed that those studies (showing benefits of moderate alcohol consumption) are based on a sampling bias. Those studies compare a group N of people who never drink with a group O of people who occasionally drink. Group N usually shows slightly more health issues than group O - hence the conclusion. But the problem is simply that there are reasons why people decide to abstain completely from alcohol. And those reasons are often health issues or problems with alcohol in the past. From that angle it is a triviality. Alcohol is mildly toxic to almost all organs - of course maximizing health will be achieved by avoiding it entirely.

kartan 8y ago

I would like that people saw this as a reality check to another promoted narrative. "Sometimes, beer loves us back too: Studies have suggested that, when consumed in moderation, beer has many health benefits." - http://www.foxnews.com/story/2010/01/15/healthy-beer-drinking.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/2010/01/15/healthy-beer-drinkin... "Despite the health benefits of moderate drinking, Holahan emphasizes the need for common sense. One or two drinks a day may be beneficial for some, but drinking a lot more can be dangerous, he said." - https://news.utexas.edu/2010/08/27/psychology_drinking https://news.utexas.edu/2010/08/27/psychology_drinking One in Five Americans Say Moderate Drinking Is Healthy - https://news.gallup.com/poll/184382/one-five-americans-say-moderate-drinking-healthy.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/184382/one-five-americans-say-m... So there is still people believing that alcohol may be healthy. It is good to understand that it is not. And that to decide to drink will have consequences. I have seen an increase of availability of alcohol-free drinks for the past decade that allow you to hang out with your friends, keeping that very needed human contact, but allowing you to not suffer the adverse effects of alcohol and to drive safe home.

FabHK 8y ago
Just want to point out that in many countries public transport is such that to „drive safe home“ is not a consideration.
- kartan 8y ago
  Yes, you are completely right. Going Friday night back home in Stockholms tunnelbana can fully confirm this. :)
topmonk 8y ago
> So there is still people believing that alcohol may be healthy. It is good to understand that it is not. And that to decide to drink will have consequences. From the article: What's more, any protective health effects of alcohol were offset by the drink's risk, including strong links between alcohol consumption and the risk of cancer and injuries such as those resulting from car accidents. It depends, though. If your family has a high risk of cancer, but a low risk of diabetes or heart problems (or if you drink and drive), then alcohol will probably increase your risk. However, if your family has a low risk of cancer, and a higher risk of heart disease, maybe you'd be better off drinking a little.

mattnewport 8y ago

Having stopped drinking a bit over a year ago I'm curious if I'll actually recover from some of the damaging health effects or just not get any worse. I recall reading that for smoking your chance of dying returns to normal about 10 years after quitting but I'm not sure if there is similar research for drinking

HelloNurse 8y ago

This article is focused on average alcohol consumption. It only proves that if more alcohol is consumed there are more people who drink enough to have problems, not that everyone has problems.

cwyers 8y ago

The problem with this study is that all nutritional studies are unreliable, and the problem is getting worse. > These implausible estimates of benefits or risks associated with diet probably reflect almost exclusively the magnitude of the cumulative biases in this type of research, with extensive residual confounding and selective reporting.3 Almost all nutritional variables are correlated with one another; thus, if one variable is causally related to health outcomes, many other variables will also yield significant associations in large enough data sets. With more research involving big data, almost all nutritional variables will be associated with almost all outcomes. Moreover, given the complicated associations of eating behaviors and patterns with many time-varying social and behavioral factors that also affect health, no currently available cohort includes sufficient information to address confounding in nutritional associations. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social_jama&utm_term=1735239284&utm_content=followers-article_engagement-image_stock&utm_campaign=article_alert&linkId=55887642 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2698337?ut... Someone will come out two weeks from now and say booze makes you immortal.

Mikeb85 8y ago

The 'findings' of this study are so convoluted it's obvious they have an agenda. Yes, alcohol can cause dangerous behaviour and social problems. This doesn't mean there isn't a safe level of consumption, safe meaning such that the alcoholic drink itself doesn't harm your body. Also funny that they mention alcohol can decrease the occurrence of certain heart diseases (one of the largest killers) but that doesn't mean it's safe because it increases the rate of certain cancers (which kill less people than heart disease) so the conclusion is that it's not safe. Personally, I'll go with the fact that alcohol has been consumed for all of human history, the fact that many alcohol consuming cultures have longer life expectancy than some abstinent cultures (not proof in itself, but a 'good enough' observation for my own personal peace of mind), and the fact that I'd rather eat and drink well than gain what, an extra year or two of life? I'm healthy, not overweight, active, most of my ancestors in recent history lived to 90+ years old with sub-par diets and drinking habits, I'm not convinced ultra-healthy eating and abstinence is going to be worth the boredom.

archagon 8y ago

Coincidentally, I'm hoping to release a (simple) iOS app next week that will help keep your drinking under a preset weekly limit. Will automatically add your drinks as calories to HealthKit and pull recent check-ins from Untappd: https://i.imgur.com/MhJm6Si.png https://i.imgur.com/MhJm6Si.png As an avid craft beer fan, I've been trying to keep my drinking under 120g of pure alcohol a week (which is about 9 standard drinks) by way of a Calca spreadsheet over the past two years. It's been very effective, but a bit annoying to wrangle manually. Figured I'd finally turn it into an actual product. I think I'll probably release the code under GPL.