13 ms·

Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

200 points by open-source-ux 7y ago

_Microft 7y ago
Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily). If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
- Dirlewanger 7y ago
  I'm surprised this was mentioned at all. There's even newer research that basically shows any amount of alcohol regularly is bad for you.
  - izzydata 7y ago
    The idea that any amount of alcohol is bad for you is about as surprising of a concept to me as vaping actually being bad for you. Drinking poison or filling your lungs with anything that isn't air is not healthy.
    - bosie 7y ago
      Presumably you are not including any mental benefits? Or consider 'stress' of any sorts as a non-health issue?
      - thebean11 7y ago
        Or social benefits, depending on which country you live in. Way too broad to say that any alcohol is "bad for you".
        kristofferR 7y ago
        And social benefits can have massive physical repercussions. Happiness breeds healthiness, loneliness the opposite. Of course I'm not implying that alcohol is in any way healthy, but it's probably healthier to have great drunk moments with your friends once in a while than it is to be lonely and not drink. It's important to note that you certainly can be social without alcohol though.
      - izzydata 7y ago
        Of course stress is a problem, but the thought that you have to drink to solve that problem is a terrible thought to me. It is unfortunate if this is what society thinks.
    - Cougher 7y ago
      "What can we say? We know alcohol's a toxin. We'll never believe alcohol can be good for you. This is America, for chrissake! We're willing to die for our true beliefs!" https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society/201011/science-is-what-society-says-it-is-alcohols-poison https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society...
    - zip1234 7y ago
      Also, air can often be unhealthy. Even places where the air is 'clean.'
  - Cougher 7y ago
    That's mighty convincing evidence you have right there.
    - Dirlewanger 7y ago
      Here's one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext#seccestitle200 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... From the conclusion: "Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none."
- alamortsubite 7y ago
  The reported BMJ study does not recommend teetotalers take up drinking; it only suggests moderation for individuals who already consume alcohol. "We observed a relatively small difference in life expectancies across different levels of alcohol consumption compared with other individual lifestyle factors. The cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have been consistently observed in large cohort studies, but alcohol consumption and risk of cancer showed a dose-response relation. Thus, current guidelines do not encourage a non-alcohol drinker to start drinking just for the benefit of preventing cardiovascular disease."
  - _Microft 7y ago
    My mistake, I should have been more precise in my formulations. I was rather surprised that daily alcohol consumption still counted as moderate.
    - laurencerowe 7y ago
      This seems to be a cultural UK/US difference which I've noticed moving to the US. In the UK a glass of wine with food every night would be seen as part of a healthy mediterranean diet and health advice on alcohol was refocussed to discourage binge drinking, emphasizing daily rather than weekly consumption limits. In the US daily drinking seems to be seen as bad (perhaps a legacy of prohibition?) while binge drinking once a week doesn't seem to be seen as particularly problematic.
      - pkaye 7y ago
        In the US its a pretty skewed distribution. 30% don't drink at all. Another 30% less than once per week. The top 10% drinks a crazy amount. https://drinksfeed.com/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/ https://drinksfeed.com/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will...
        Bartweiss 7y ago
        The data is also an unbelievable mess. We can work towards drinking from two directions: self report consumption and alcohol sales ought to lead to the same number. Not perfectly of course - drinks get thrown away, saved as gifts, used to cook, and so on. But last I looked, the ratio of drinks sold to drinking reported in the US was two to one. (I'd love to see the same data for other countries.) So either people understating their drinking by a huge amount, or the studies are undersampling groups that do a lot of drinking. Probably both. We can make some good guesses: minors probably don't admit to their drinking, teetotalers probably self-report more accurately than occasional drinkers, and so on. But it's a gap so big that it's hard to talk confidently about what people here are doing.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Not only that, but these articles always say the "what" and not the "why". Daily consumption of alcohol for example, depletes glutathione. The more you drink, the more that is depleted. Once your reserves are gone, the liver will still protect you, at the cost of itself. It essentially slowly self destructs to neutralize the alcohol once the glutathione is gone. People will always give examples of someone they knew that lived to 100 and had a shot of whiskey every day. Makes sense, they were replenishing their glutathione reserves faster than depleting it. It's obviously much more complicated of a process than what I described, but people don't have a way to measure it. The liver will try to detox people until it hits something like 5% capacity and then the symptoms are really obvious. By then, it is too late.
- capkutay 7y ago
  Also have to factor in the opportunity cost of drinking...going for a drink after work instead of the gym? What comes next? Bar food with your beer and maybe a pizza? I'd rather have the work out, good meal, hydrate, and get good sleep. It's obvious that good habits snowball into more good habits, while bad habits snowball into more bad habits.
  - maximente 7y ago
    haha, this reads like some abstinence only sex education argument or something. don't let that one beer turn in to a good time! i think it's funny that having a good (if not optimally healthy) time would be so ridiculed, but maybe that's just me. FWIW i know a lot of people who work out at 4:30am in order to gain that time for after work social activities which often include alcohol, so not mutually exclusive.
    - joshschultheiss 7y ago
      Not the commenter you replied to, but I feel like you both have valid points. > Bar food with your beer and maybe a pizza? > don't let that one beer turn in to a good time! Personally, I prefer to enjoy the social benefits of going out without the consequences of alcohol or "bar food." I accept people's drug habits - it's fine to consume drugs responsibly (alcohol included). For me, I am able to have a good time and "let loose" without being under the influence of drugs. There's nothing wrong with being sober. You can still participate in the local economy, engage in social events, and live a healthy life without fitting the routine you described of going to the bar and hitting the gym. Anyways, my point of saying this is that I wonder if alcohol for most people increases their life expectancy because it lets them socialize more. In the same way that people buy essential oils and it has a placebo effect on the that make them feel better, I think the bar scene has the same effect on many Americans. My social experience is that people are mentally unable to "let loose" and socialize without the aide of drugs.
      - capkutay 7y ago
        Exactly. Personally I don't like drinking. I see the fun of getting drunk with friends and all..experienced it in my college years...but I don't like the unspoken pressure/expectation that you have to be on something to have a good time.
- lelf 7y ago
  Quite surprising for me too. Or rather, I don't understand the unit they mention. From the article linked: also collected alcoholic beverage consumption, including red and white wine separately (4 ounces, increasing to 5 ounces in 2006), beer (one glass, can, or bottle), and liquor (one drink or shot). We multiplied the amount of alcohol in grams per specified portion size by servings per day, determined the midpoint of the frequency category, and summed across all beverages to estimate the average alcohol consumption (g/day). We defined moderate alcohol consumption as 5-15 g/day for women and 5-30 g/day for men Surely it cannot be 4 bottles of beer daily (or 4*7 bottles on weekend).
  - laurencerowe 7y ago
    A unit is 10ml of pure alcohol, roughly half a pint of 4% beer or half a glass of wine. This unit value is printed clearly on pretty much all alcohol containers. (In the US it seems incredibly difficult to find the ABV % for the drinks you buy.) A bottle of beer is usually 330ml so 1.3 units, so moderate drinking would be defined as up to 2 pints or 3 bottles of 4% beer daily.
    - kyleee 7y ago
      I believe ABV is printed on every alcohol label in the US (I suspect there is a regulation mandating it)
      - laurencerowe 7y ago
        While most does, at least the box of Heineken in my fridge (don't judge me, left over from a party!) doesn't have the ABV on the box, though does on the cans inside.
  - jimam 7y ago
    A bottle of beer (say 500ml) at 5% strength would be 2.5 units, so not as much as 4 bottles a day [1]. Also worth noting that alcohol you buy in shops in the UK has the number of units printed on the label, so it's fairly easy to keep track of. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_alcohol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_alcohol
- izzydata 7y ago
  That one doesn't make any sense to me. Alcohol is basically poison. Perhaps small amounts of it won't do any harm to you, but how could it possibly have a positive effect on your health?
  - twinkletwinkle_ 7y ago
    The key word is definitely "only".
    - izzydata 7y ago
      I don't agree. Even if you "only" drank in moderation forever and never drank too much for your liver to deal with it isn't helping anything. At the absolute best it simply isn't hurting anything. Which I'm really not convinced that is even true.
      - freetime2 7y ago
        I didn’t read that advice to mean you should drink daily. Rather that if you do drink, it should be limited to a certain amount per day.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    It’s also a stress-reliever, and is frequently consumed in the company of others, so it has social benefits as well.
  - mrlala 7y ago
    Maybe it can have a positive affect on your mental health, in moderation? Sharing a bottle of wine or champagne with my wife can be one of the most enjoyable experiences to us.. going out to the pub having some beer with family & friends is great. An argument could be "you can have just as much fun doing something else", but I don't know.. that's not really my experience. A moderate amount of drinking usually makes things even more fun.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
- Hoasi 7y ago
  > Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily). These figures are not absolute. Other studies consider someone an alcoholic as soon as there is a craving for alcohol. The risk is higher for someone who drinks daily. Standards of what is acceptable also vary from country to country.
- rantwasp 7y ago
  no. you need to start drinking 4 units per day if you want to live longer /s
- loblollyboy 7y ago
  I get drunk and act like an absolute idiot, but I also don't really care. it's like the ying to my yang of trying really hard and being serious/ pretending to be serious about things. Hedonism is just as valid as a lifestyle choice as the other options (prove me wrong!) The one thing I don't like about drinking is that it's basically a cheat code. It makes mundane stuff fun, if it were removed as an option, then maybe I would try other stuff and live a more interesting life.
leoplct 7y ago
How can I have a top40% healthy diet score? w
- rantwasp 7y ago
  be rich. eat organic. cut sugar consumption
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- npsimons 7y ago
  They didn't list this, but most things I've heard (eg, "How Not to Die" by Dr. Michael Greger who reads a lot of studies) is to eat a whole food, plant based diet. Might not have to give up meat completely, but the less you eat, the healthier you will tend to be.
- smiley1437 7y ago
  This isn't an exact answer, but the article links here: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/ That page has some dietary recommendations: - Eat more fibre (at least 30g a day) - Cut down on saturated fat - Get your 5 A Day (servings of fruit and vegetables) - Cut down on salt (no more than 6 grams a day) - Eat fish (at least twice a week)
- tomp 7y ago
  If you live 10 years longer, you're almost guaranteed to have top 10% healthy diet score.
mortenjorck 7y ago
This is one of the best general-audience presentations of a study I've seen. The "What kind of research was this?" section, with a quick explainer on cohort studies, is by itself a lot more context than many media outlets offer, and the other sections add up to an accessible primer on how this type of study is performed, no scientific background required. Excellent science communication from the NHS.
- andrepd 7y ago
  NHS's online communication is almost always excellent.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  This is an example of a thing they do where they make a point of responding to things that get media buzz, so if you see something elsewhere it is usually worth googling to see if they have a response.
Someone1234 7y ago
Living a long and healthy life is simple, but it isn't easy. Which is to say almost everybody knows this, very few people live it. The toughest battle isn't yet again telling people that 1+1=2, but rather figuring out ways to make it more accessible to people (read: cheap, low time commitment) and more sustainable as a lifestyle. That's why ideas like HIIT[0] and IM[1] are interesting, not because they're superior to getting doctor recommended levels of exercise and eating the recommended nutrition but because people actually do them and stick to them, and they're "less bad" then doing nothing. "Perfect is the enemy of good" is the enemy of people's health too, and the medical profession obsessed over what the Greek God tier lifestyle should look like while ignoring "easy wins." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_traini... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting
- realtalk_sp 7y ago
  I love the example of HIIT. I discovered it inadvertently 10 years ago when I switched to recreational sprinting as a primary form of exercise. It results in excellent physical conditioning with a minimal time investment (about one hour per week total). Establishing habits is difficult and complex. Finding highly efficient (in time, energy, drudgery, money, etc) ways to achieve a desired outcome is a critically important cornerstone of that process, in my experience.
  - TurkishPoptart 7y ago
    Any way for lazy people to get started with HIIT without going to a gym?
    - codingmess 7y ago
      There is an app by the people who invented it, afaik. And other apps, too. (7 Minute Workout, I think that's the same thing?)
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
low_common 7y ago
Does < 10 cigarettes a month count as smoking?
- seveneightn9ne 7y ago
  No, smoking is usually defined as smoking daily. But there's so few people that smoke less-than-daily that they aren't usually included in these sort of studies so it's harder to say what sort of effect it has.
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    Is there really that few people? I know several people that only smoke occasionally.
  - thebean11 7y ago
    Seems pretty common in my experience, pretty much always "I only smoke when I drink" folks.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Zenst 7y ago
  How big are the cigarettes, how deep do you inhale, how strong are the cigarettes you smoke, type of filter... So many factors. But no simple X is safe and X+n is bad formular to appease any concerns. Everybody is different and all these Recommended Daily limits are all based on an average that none of us fully fit into. I will say though that anything in moderation is the only rule of thumb that still carries, after all - stress does kill and if by not having a few cig's you increase your stress then you may find that your reducing your health even more due to the stress. Moral being, be happy and if you have to question it, then you already know the answer that's best for you.
  - umvi 7y ago
    I don't think "smoking in moderation" is the best answer for anyone for any reason. Stress can be dealt with in many many ways that are better for your health than tobacco.
ruminasean 7y ago
It's funny...I don't drink, never smoked, and don't eat meat or sugar, but I'm not really hoping to live until some crazy age.
crazygringo 7y ago
> not smoking It's a pet peeve of mine, but I really wish smoking weren't presented as a binary choice in medicine and science. I know a lot of people who smoke socially but only socially. They probably have an average of somewhere between half to maybe five or six cigarettes a week -- less than one a day, universally. (For comparison, it's believed that addiction only starts to kick it at around 5 cigarettes per day.) It would be nice if studies used granularity for smoking akin to that used for alcohol.
- platz 7y ago
  Smoking causes other things besides the things that happen near the end of your life. It also affects your immune system; injuries take longer to heal. You don't have to be a pack-a-day person to experience these effects... i know!
- umvi 7y ago
  From a public health standpoint it sounds like your pet peeve is that people don't tolerate "smoking in moderation".
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    Not at all. It's that if light smokers self-identify as smokers in research, then it can mask the greater damage done in heavy smokers. While if light smokers self-identify as non-smokers, it may reduce the overall difference between true non-smokers and heavy smokers. Either way, it leads to the same kind of dangerous misinterpretation of data you'd have if there were only two categories "never drink" and "blackout drunk nightly".
- jklein11 7y ago
  It seems that even social smoking has a sognificantly negative impact on your health. I’m not sure the same is true with alcohol. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865193/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865193/
- zackmorris 7y ago
  Part of this is the cultural failure of western medicine to recognize all drugs as sacraments. It's also a failure of justice systems to ban discrimination based on drug use. So for example, I wrote that I was a smoker once on an insurance application (at the time as a 2-3 per day, 1 pack per week social smoker) and my insurance went up almost $100 per month. But the risk of not being truthful would be possible denied coverage down the road if I ever did develop respiratory problems. So insurance effectively encourages lying as a financial incentive (since the vast majority of people don't develop problems social smoking) as well as a racket (a loophole that corporations can use to deny coverage). But there's no way to talk about something like this in polite society, because people effectively lose their minds. For example, I hate that my parents smoke, and often wish that tobacco never existed. Yet I treasure my memories of social smoking at parties, and consider counterculture stuff like that to be part of my ethos. IMHO the only solution is to be vigilant in denying corporate control over our liberty and justice. Which is increasingly difficult in these times. I'm hopeful that the 2020s will unwind some of the oppression that's happened since 2001 though.
nkingsy 7y ago
The fact that it was health care professionals studied leads to the possible confounding factor that people who had unhealthy lifestyles were very aware of their choice to be unhealthy, meaning a possible placebo effect
- 6nf 7y ago
  If I actually live longer I don’t care if it was the placebo effect or not.
giardini 7y ago
Leaving sex out of the equation was an unfortunate oversight. STDs cause a lot of grief and arguably as much or more damage than diet. AIDS speaks for itself; herpes is implicated in Alzheimer's, heart disease and other ailments and is just a general curse without the modern antivirals (although many persons are naturally immune); gonorrhea and syphilis continue to mutate to new drug-resistant forms.
- vzidex 7y ago
  You can have sex without getting STDs - either by sticking with one/few monogamous relationships, or just using protection. On the other hand, sex has been found to have lots of benefits (I'm at work so I don't want to be looking up citations, but intuitively a few minutes of cardio can't be a bad thing).
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    "You can have sex without getting STDs" also means it's a pain to study. Almost all mortality is statistical - you can smoke your whole life without getting lung cancer - but STDs are an even more random risk factor. There's no cumulative damage across events, detection and treatment are massively influential, and different populations have completely different risk profiles. These findings are backed by two cohort studies, one on female nurses in the UK and one on male health professionals in the US. There's really not much chance their STD outcomes correspond to the general population.
- gowld 7y ago
  Also celibacy causes a lot of unhealthy stress and unbalanced hormones.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Not to mention having children, which if my experience is any indication is the #1 reason parents use for being overweight and unfit, not having time and/or energy to properly care for themselves now that they have kids.
  - deleted 7y ago
DenisM 7y ago
> drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) This part Of “stay healthy” advice has always puzzled me - it looks like full blown alcoholism. Am I way off?
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > This part Of “stay healthy” advice has always puzzled me - it looks like full blown alcoholism. Am I way off? Yes, probably because you are mistaking a not-more-on-any-day-than level for a constant-consumption-every-day level. Oh, and also confusing addiction with level of consumption.
- vzidex 7y ago
  I think the idea is that full-blown alcoholism is what really destroys your body. That being said, the link is definitely inconclusive - this is the article I always think of when thinking about alcohol [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45283401 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45283401
- gowld 7y ago
  There's slow low key buzz in afternoon/evening, evening and there's overloading your liver binging. Also those numbers are not adjusted for body size. Some non-obese people weigh 100lb and some weigh 260lb.
- vkou 7y ago
  4 units is not 4 beers. A single 7% beer bottle is 3 units. 9 beers a week is... Not quite full-blown alcoholism. But I can see why the study picked that as a threshold.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    A 25ml (.8oz) shot of 40% proof is 1 unit. 4 of those per day is one hell of a “healthy habit”. I don’t know how large beer bottles are in the US, but 330ml (11.2oz) at 7% is 2.3 units. (These are all European measurements, if that makes a difference. The NHS is in the U.K., though, where 1 unit = 10 ml of pure alcohol).
tomp 7y ago
> having a healthy diet score in the top 40% of people in the study Correlation does not equal causation. It's obvious from this statement that the relationship is not (necessarily) causal. Yeah "top 10% of the people in study live longer" isn't really revolutionary.
- alanbernstein 7y ago
  Yeah, that's a funny way for them to phrase it. I think the point is that you don't need a nearly-unachievable "top 5% diet" to be a healthy person - you just need to put in a little effort.
jopsen 7y ago
Hmm, the list of habits wasn't even that bad: Don't smoke, drink little, keep a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9, exercise 30min per day, have a diet in the top 40-percentile most healthy. These seems like feasible habits. Sure if you're overweight, smoking or drinking a lot changing the status isn't easy. But you don't have to go vegan :)
- odonnellryan 7y ago
  But go vegan. It's easy!
  - shantly 7y ago
    I eat mostly vegetarian (I'm not a principled vegetarian so I'll eat meat in some circumstances, just way less than most people) and that's pretty easy, but milk is really cheap & convenient (chemically) for so much cooking, eggs are like a nutrition-on-a-budget cheat code and also chemically useful in lots of cooking, and I love cheese. Going vegan would hurt. [EDIT] if there's one modification I'd really like to make to my diet, it'd be to add fish once or so per week, ideally the fatty, oily, low-on-the-food-chain sort that're supposed to be so heatlhy. I need some kind of guide for how to work up to enjoying fish when you didn't grow up eating it. I can tolerate larger fish when cooked & seasoned very well, but don't really enjoy it at all, and have no understanding of what even to do with the smaller, healthier sorts that isn't stomach-turning (to me) to even consider. Though for some reason I love sushi and calamari, so, go figure.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    I don't expect anyone to rehash the usual debates over this, but I have a question I've never found answered convincingly... How the heck do vegans eat high-protein diets? I don't mean "get enough protein to avoid deficiency", there are lots of recipes for that. But practically every vegan food I see described as "high protein" is well under 1/3 protein, which is a pretty unremarkable target if you want to build muscle. Eggs are a really easy way to fix that: you can eat a lot of them, you get a pretty good range of micronutrients, and their macros are majority-protein so you have "budget" for other foods. Is the vegan fix just getting really good at cooking seitan with green vegetables? That's (with tempeh and tofu) the only option I've found that's even in the right ballpark.
philip1209 7y ago
Four drinks per day is "moderate"?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Four units = two pints of lager = less than half a bottle of red wine. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alcohol-units/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alc...
boyadjian 7y ago
The first of the good habits is a good diet. The first medicine is food.
- sn9 7y ago
  I'd actually say that the most impactful first habit is regular exercise. Especially a few hours of strength training and a few hours of aerobic exercise per week. You can have a mediocre diet and still see huge health benefits. The opposite is not true: a sedentary lifestyle will kill you and the last years will be miserable with little in the way of physical autonomy.
arjie 7y ago
Does anyone have a link to the AHEI-2010 (the 2010 version of the Alternative Healthy Eating Index)? I can't find it easily anywhere on the Internet.
smugtrain 7y ago
As an added benefit, being annoyingly healthy and so proud to announce your superiority to the world will make you smarts smell so fine, you will capture them in a sniffing glass, just to savor your good habits
cjlars 7y ago
The drink units are weird in this article. Most people (in the US) think of a drink as closer to a 1.5oz 80 proof shot or 12oz of 5% abv beer, which works out to 17.75ml of ethanol. The article defines a drink as 10ml of ethanol. So the guidline for men would be on a bit over 2 budweisers per day.
- detaro 7y ago
  It's explicitly not "a drink" that's defined as such, but a "unit of alcohol". It's a standard measure in the UK for actual alcohol content in drinks.

Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily). If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.

Dirlewanger 7y ago
I'm surprised this was mentioned at all. There's even newer research that basically shows any amount of alcohol regularly is bad for you.
- izzydata 7y ago
  The idea that any amount of alcohol is bad for you is about as surprising of a concept to me as vaping actually being bad for you. Drinking poison or filling your lungs with anything that isn't air is not healthy.
  - bosie 7y ago
    Presumably you are not including any mental benefits? Or consider 'stress' of any sorts as a non-health issue?
    - thebean11 7y ago
      Or social benefits, depending on which country you live in. Way too broad to say that any alcohol is "bad for you".
      - kristofferR 7y ago
        And social benefits can have massive physical repercussions. Happiness breeds healthiness, loneliness the opposite. Of course I'm not implying that alcohol is in any way healthy, but it's probably healthier to have great drunk moments with your friends once in a while than it is to be lonely and not drink. It's important to note that you certainly can be social without alcohol though.
    - izzydata 7y ago
      Of course stress is a problem, but the thought that you have to drink to solve that problem is a terrible thought to me. It is unfortunate if this is what society thinks.
  - Cougher 7y ago
    "What can we say? We know alcohol's a toxin. We'll never believe alcohol can be good for you. This is America, for chrissake! We're willing to die for our true beliefs!" https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society/201011/science-is-what-society-says-it-is-alcohols-poison https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society...
  - zip1234 7y ago
    Also, air can often be unhealthy. Even places where the air is 'clean.'
- Cougher 7y ago
  That's mighty convincing evidence you have right there.
  - Dirlewanger 7y ago
    Here's one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext#seccestitle200 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... From the conclusion: "Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none."
alamortsubite 7y ago
The reported BMJ study does not recommend teetotalers take up drinking; it only suggests moderation for individuals who already consume alcohol. "We observed a relatively small difference in life expectancies across different levels of alcohol consumption compared with other individual lifestyle factors. The cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have been consistently observed in large cohort studies, but alcohol consumption and risk of cancer showed a dose-response relation. Thus, current guidelines do not encourage a non-alcohol drinker to start drinking just for the benefit of preventing cardiovascular disease."
- _Microft 7y ago
  My mistake, I should have been more precise in my formulations. I was rather surprised that daily alcohol consumption still counted as moderate.
  - laurencerowe 7y ago
    This seems to be a cultural UK/US difference which I've noticed moving to the US. In the UK a glass of wine with food every night would be seen as part of a healthy mediterranean diet and health advice on alcohol was refocussed to discourage binge drinking, emphasizing daily rather than weekly consumption limits. In the US daily drinking seems to be seen as bad (perhaps a legacy of prohibition?) while binge drinking once a week doesn't seem to be seen as particularly problematic.
    - pkaye 7y ago
      In the US its a pretty skewed distribution. 30% don't drink at all. Another 30% less than once per week. The top 10% drinks a crazy amount. https://drinksfeed.com/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/ https://drinksfeed.com/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will...
      - Bartweiss 7y ago
        The data is also an unbelievable mess. We can work towards drinking from two directions: self report consumption and alcohol sales ought to lead to the same number. Not perfectly of course - drinks get thrown away, saved as gifts, used to cook, and so on. But last I looked, the ratio of drinks sold to drinking reported in the US was two to one. (I'd love to see the same data for other countries.) So either people understating their drinking by a huge amount, or the studies are undersampling groups that do a lot of drinking. Probably both. We can make some good guesses: minors probably don't admit to their drinking, teetotalers probably self-report more accurately than occasional drinkers, and so on. But it's a gap so big that it's hard to talk confidently about what people here are doing.
LinuxBender 7y ago
Not only that, but these articles always say the "what" and not the "why". Daily consumption of alcohol for example, depletes glutathione. The more you drink, the more that is depleted. Once your reserves are gone, the liver will still protect you, at the cost of itself. It essentially slowly self destructs to neutralize the alcohol once the glutathione is gone. People will always give examples of someone they knew that lived to 100 and had a shot of whiskey every day. Makes sense, they were replenishing their glutathione reserves faster than depleting it. It's obviously much more complicated of a process than what I described, but people don't have a way to measure it. The liver will try to detox people until it hits something like 5% capacity and then the symptoms are really obvious. By then, it is too late.
capkutay 7y ago
Also have to factor in the opportunity cost of drinking...going for a drink after work instead of the gym? What comes next? Bar food with your beer and maybe a pizza? I'd rather have the work out, good meal, hydrate, and get good sleep. It's obvious that good habits snowball into more good habits, while bad habits snowball into more bad habits.
- maximente 7y ago
  haha, this reads like some abstinence only sex education argument or something. don't let that one beer turn in to a good time! i think it's funny that having a good (if not optimally healthy) time would be so ridiculed, but maybe that's just me. FWIW i know a lot of people who work out at 4:30am in order to gain that time for after work social activities which often include alcohol, so not mutually exclusive.
  - joshschultheiss 7y ago
    Not the commenter you replied to, but I feel like you both have valid points. > Bar food with your beer and maybe a pizza? > don't let that one beer turn in to a good time! Personally, I prefer to enjoy the social benefits of going out without the consequences of alcohol or "bar food." I accept people's drug habits - it's fine to consume drugs responsibly (alcohol included). For me, I am able to have a good time and "let loose" without being under the influence of drugs. There's nothing wrong with being sober. You can still participate in the local economy, engage in social events, and live a healthy life without fitting the routine you described of going to the bar and hitting the gym. Anyways, my point of saying this is that I wonder if alcohol for most people increases their life expectancy because it lets them socialize more. In the same way that people buy essential oils and it has a placebo effect on the that make them feel better, I think the bar scene has the same effect on many Americans. My social experience is that people are mentally unable to "let loose" and socialize without the aide of drugs.
    - capkutay 7y ago
      Exactly. Personally I don't like drinking. I see the fun of getting drunk with friends and all..experienced it in my college years...but I don't like the unspoken pressure/expectation that you have to be on something to have a good time.
lelf 7y ago
Quite surprising for me too. Or rather, I don't understand the unit they mention. From the article linked: also collected alcoholic beverage consumption, including red and white wine separately (4 ounces, increasing to 5 ounces in 2006), beer (one glass, can, or bottle), and liquor (one drink or shot). We multiplied the amount of alcohol in grams per specified portion size by servings per day, determined the midpoint of the frequency category, and summed across all beverages to estimate the average alcohol consumption (g/day). We defined moderate alcohol consumption as 5-15 g/day for women and 5-30 g/day for men Surely it cannot be 4 bottles of beer daily (or 4*7 bottles on weekend).
- laurencerowe 7y ago
  A unit is 10ml of pure alcohol, roughly half a pint of 4% beer or half a glass of wine. This unit value is printed clearly on pretty much all alcohol containers. (In the US it seems incredibly difficult to find the ABV % for the drinks you buy.) A bottle of beer is usually 330ml so 1.3 units, so moderate drinking would be defined as up to 2 pints or 3 bottles of 4% beer daily.
  - kyleee 7y ago
    I believe ABV is printed on every alcohol label in the US (I suspect there is a regulation mandating it)
    - laurencerowe 7y ago
      While most does, at least the box of Heineken in my fridge (don't judge me, left over from a party!) doesn't have the ABV on the box, though does on the cans inside.
- jimam 7y ago
  A bottle of beer (say 500ml) at 5% strength would be 2.5 units, so not as much as 4 bottles a day [1]. Also worth noting that alcohol you buy in shops in the UK has the number of units printed on the label, so it's fairly easy to keep track of. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_alcohol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_alcohol
izzydata 7y ago
That one doesn't make any sense to me. Alcohol is basically poison. Perhaps small amounts of it won't do any harm to you, but how could it possibly have a positive effect on your health?
- twinkletwinkle_ 7y ago
  The key word is definitely "only".
  - izzydata 7y ago
    I don't agree. Even if you "only" drank in moderation forever and never drank too much for your liver to deal with it isn't helping anything. At the absolute best it simply isn't hurting anything. Which I'm really not convinced that is even true.
    - freetime2 7y ago
      I didn’t read that advice to mean you should drink daily. Rather that if you do drink, it should be limited to a certain amount per day.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  It’s also a stress-reliever, and is frequently consumed in the company of others, so it has social benefits as well.
- mrlala 7y ago
  Maybe it can have a positive affect on your mental health, in moderation? Sharing a bottle of wine or champagne with my wife can be one of the most enjoyable experiences to us.. going out to the pub having some beer with family & friends is great. An argument could be "you can have just as much fun doing something else", but I don't know.. that's not really my experience. A moderate amount of drinking usually makes things even more fun.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
Hoasi 7y ago
> Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily). These figures are not absolute. Other studies consider someone an alcoholic as soon as there is a craving for alcohol. The risk is higher for someone who drinks daily. Standards of what is acceptable also vary from country to country.
rantwasp 7y ago
no. you need to start drinking 4 units per day if you want to live longer /s
loblollyboy 7y ago
I get drunk and act like an absolute idiot, but I also don't really care. it's like the ying to my yang of trying really hard and being serious/ pretending to be serious about things. Hedonism is just as valid as a lifestyle choice as the other options (prove me wrong!) The one thing I don't like about drinking is that it's basically a cheat code. It makes mundane stuff fun, if it were removed as an option, then maybe I would try other stuff and live a more interesting life.

leoplct 7y ago

How can I have a top40% healthy diet score? w

rantwasp 7y ago
be rich. eat organic. cut sugar consumption
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
npsimons 7y ago
They didn't list this, but most things I've heard (eg, "How Not to Die" by Dr. Michael Greger who reads a lot of studies) is to eat a whole food, plant based diet. Might not have to give up meat completely, but the less you eat, the healthier you will tend to be.
smiley1437 7y ago
This isn't an exact answer, but the article links here: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/ That page has some dietary recommendations: - Eat more fibre (at least 30g a day) - Cut down on saturated fat - Get your 5 A Day (servings of fruit and vegetables) - Cut down on salt (no more than 6 grams a day) - Eat fish (at least twice a week)
tomp 7y ago
If you live 10 years longer, you're almost guaranteed to have top 10% healthy diet score.

mortenjorck 7y ago

This is one of the best general-audience presentations of a study I've seen. The "What kind of research was this?" section, with a quick explainer on cohort studies, is by itself a lot more context than many media outlets offer, and the other sections add up to an accessible primer on how this type of study is performed, no scientific background required. Excellent science communication from the NHS.

andrepd 7y ago
NHS's online communication is almost always excellent.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
This is an example of a thing they do where they make a point of responding to things that get media buzz, so if you see something elsewhere it is usually worth googling to see if they have a response.

Someone1234 7y ago

Living a long and healthy life is simple, but it isn't easy. Which is to say almost everybody knows this, very few people live it. The toughest battle isn't yet again telling people that 1+1=2, but rather figuring out ways to make it more accessible to people (read: cheap, low time commitment) and more sustainable as a lifestyle. That's why ideas like HIIT[0] and IM[1] are interesting, not because they're superior to getting doctor recommended levels of exercise and eating the recommended nutrition but because people actually do them and stick to them, and they're "less bad" then doing nothing. "Perfect is the enemy of good" is the enemy of people's health too, and the medical profession obsessed over what the Greek God tier lifestyle should look like while ignoring "easy wins." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_traini... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting

realtalk_sp 7y ago
I love the example of HIIT. I discovered it inadvertently 10 years ago when I switched to recreational sprinting as a primary form of exercise. It results in excellent physical conditioning with a minimal time investment (about one hour per week total). Establishing habits is difficult and complex. Finding highly efficient (in time, energy, drudgery, money, etc) ways to achieve a desired outcome is a critically important cornerstone of that process, in my experience.
- TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  Any way for lazy people to get started with HIIT without going to a gym?
  - codingmess 7y ago
    There is an app by the people who invented it, afaik. And other apps, too. (7 Minute Workout, I think that's the same thing?)
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago

low_common 7y ago

Does < 10 cigarettes a month count as smoking?

seveneightn9ne 7y ago
No, smoking is usually defined as smoking daily. But there's so few people that smoke less-than-daily that they aren't usually included in these sort of studies so it's harder to say what sort of effect it has.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  Is there really that few people? I know several people that only smoke occasionally.
- thebean11 7y ago
  Seems pretty common in my experience, pretty much always "I only smoke when I drink" folks.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Zenst 7y ago
How big are the cigarettes, how deep do you inhale, how strong are the cigarettes you smoke, type of filter... So many factors. But no simple X is safe and X+n is bad formular to appease any concerns. Everybody is different and all these Recommended Daily limits are all based on an average that none of us fully fit into. I will say though that anything in moderation is the only rule of thumb that still carries, after all - stress does kill and if by not having a few cig's you increase your stress then you may find that your reducing your health even more due to the stress. Moral being, be happy and if you have to question it, then you already know the answer that's best for you.
- umvi 7y ago
  I don't think "smoking in moderation" is the best answer for anyone for any reason. Stress can be dealt with in many many ways that are better for your health than tobacco.

ruminasean 7y ago

It's funny...I don't drink, never smoked, and don't eat meat or sugar, but I'm not really hoping to live until some crazy age.

crazygringo 7y ago

> not smoking It's a pet peeve of mine, but I really wish smoking weren't presented as a binary choice in medicine and science. I know a lot of people who smoke socially but only socially. They probably have an average of somewhere between half to maybe five or six cigarettes a week -- less than one a day, universally. (For comparison, it's believed that addiction only starts to kick it at around 5 cigarettes per day.) It would be nice if studies used granularity for smoking akin to that used for alcohol.

platz 7y ago
Smoking causes other things besides the things that happen near the end of your life. It also affects your immune system; injuries take longer to heal. You don't have to be a pack-a-day person to experience these effects... i know!
umvi 7y ago
From a public health standpoint it sounds like your pet peeve is that people don't tolerate "smoking in moderation".
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Not at all. It's that if light smokers self-identify as smokers in research, then it can mask the greater damage done in heavy smokers. While if light smokers self-identify as non-smokers, it may reduce the overall difference between true non-smokers and heavy smokers. Either way, it leads to the same kind of dangerous misinterpretation of data you'd have if there were only two categories "never drink" and "blackout drunk nightly".
jklein11 7y ago
It seems that even social smoking has a sognificantly negative impact on your health. I’m not sure the same is true with alcohol. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865193/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865193/
zackmorris 7y ago
Part of this is the cultural failure of western medicine to recognize all drugs as sacraments. It's also a failure of justice systems to ban discrimination based on drug use. So for example, I wrote that I was a smoker once on an insurance application (at the time as a 2-3 per day, 1 pack per week social smoker) and my insurance went up almost $100 per month. But the risk of not being truthful would be possible denied coverage down the road if I ever did develop respiratory problems. So insurance effectively encourages lying as a financial incentive (since the vast majority of people don't develop problems social smoking) as well as a racket (a loophole that corporations can use to deny coverage). But there's no way to talk about something like this in polite society, because people effectively lose their minds. For example, I hate that my parents smoke, and often wish that tobacco never existed. Yet I treasure my memories of social smoking at parties, and consider counterculture stuff like that to be part of my ethos. IMHO the only solution is to be vigilant in denying corporate control over our liberty and justice. Which is increasingly difficult in these times. I'm hopeful that the 2020s will unwind some of the oppression that's happened since 2001 though.

nkingsy 7y ago

The fact that it was health care professionals studied leads to the possible confounding factor that people who had unhealthy lifestyles were very aware of their choice to be unhealthy, meaning a possible placebo effect

6nf 7y ago
If I actually live longer I don’t care if it was the placebo effect or not.

giardini 7y ago

Leaving sex out of the equation was an unfortunate oversight. STDs cause a lot of grief and arguably as much or more damage than diet. AIDS speaks for itself; herpes is implicated in Alzheimer's, heart disease and other ailments and is just a general curse without the modern antivirals (although many persons are naturally immune); gonorrhea and syphilis continue to mutate to new drug-resistant forms.

vzidex 7y ago
You can have sex without getting STDs - either by sticking with one/few monogamous relationships, or just using protection. On the other hand, sex has been found to have lots of benefits (I'm at work so I don't want to be looking up citations, but intuitively a few minutes of cardio can't be a bad thing).
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  "You can have sex without getting STDs" also means it's a pain to study. Almost all mortality is statistical - you can smoke your whole life without getting lung cancer - but STDs are an even more random risk factor. There's no cumulative damage across events, detection and treatment are massively influential, and different populations have completely different risk profiles. These findings are backed by two cohort studies, one on female nurses in the UK and one on male health professionals in the US. There's really not much chance their STD outcomes correspond to the general population.
gowld 7y ago
Also celibacy causes a lot of unhealthy stress and unbalanced hormones.
newnewpdro 7y ago
Not to mention having children, which if my experience is any indication is the #1 reason parents use for being overweight and unfit, not having time and/or energy to properly care for themselves now that they have kids.
- deleted 7y ago

DenisM 7y ago

> drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) This part Of “stay healthy” advice has always puzzled me - it looks like full blown alcoholism. Am I way off?

dragonwriter 7y ago
> This part Of “stay healthy” advice has always puzzled me - it looks like full blown alcoholism. Am I way off? Yes, probably because you are mistaking a not-more-on-any-day-than level for a constant-consumption-every-day level. Oh, and also confusing addiction with level of consumption.
vzidex 7y ago
I think the idea is that full-blown alcoholism is what really destroys your body. That being said, the link is definitely inconclusive - this is the article I always think of when thinking about alcohol [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45283401 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45283401
gowld 7y ago
There's slow low key buzz in afternoon/evening, evening and there's overloading your liver binging. Also those numbers are not adjusted for body size. Some non-obese people weigh 100lb and some weigh 260lb.
vkou 7y ago
4 units is not 4 beers. A single 7% beer bottle is 3 units. 9 beers a week is... Not quite full-blown alcoholism. But I can see why the study picked that as a threshold.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  A 25ml (.8oz) shot of 40% proof is 1 unit. 4 of those per day is one hell of a “healthy habit”. I don’t know how large beer bottles are in the US, but 330ml (11.2oz) at 7% is 2.3 units. (These are all European measurements, if that makes a difference. The NHS is in the U.K., though, where 1 unit = 10 ml of pure alcohol).

tomp 7y ago

> having a healthy diet score in the top 40% of people in the study Correlation does not equal causation. It's obvious from this statement that the relationship is not (necessarily) causal. Yeah "top 10% of the people in study live longer" isn't really revolutionary.

alanbernstein 7y ago
Yeah, that's a funny way for them to phrase it. I think the point is that you don't need a nearly-unachievable "top 5% diet" to be a healthy person - you just need to put in a little effort.

jopsen 7y ago

Hmm, the list of habits wasn't even that bad: Don't smoke, drink little, keep a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9, exercise 30min per day, have a diet in the top 40-percentile most healthy. These seems like feasible habits. Sure if you're overweight, smoking or drinking a lot changing the status isn't easy. But you don't have to go vegan :)

odonnellryan 7y ago
But go vegan. It's easy!
- shantly 7y ago
  I eat mostly vegetarian (I'm not a principled vegetarian so I'll eat meat in some circumstances, just way less than most people) and that's pretty easy, but milk is really cheap & convenient (chemically) for so much cooking, eggs are like a nutrition-on-a-budget cheat code and also chemically useful in lots of cooking, and I love cheese. Going vegan would hurt. [EDIT] if there's one modification I'd really like to make to my diet, it'd be to add fish once or so per week, ideally the fatty, oily, low-on-the-food-chain sort that're supposed to be so heatlhy. I need some kind of guide for how to work up to enjoying fish when you didn't grow up eating it. I can tolerate larger fish when cooked & seasoned very well, but don't really enjoy it at all, and have no understanding of what even to do with the smaller, healthier sorts that isn't stomach-turning (to me) to even consider. Though for some reason I love sushi and calamari, so, go figure.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  I don't expect anyone to rehash the usual debates over this, but I have a question I've never found answered convincingly... How the heck do vegans eat high-protein diets? I don't mean "get enough protein to avoid deficiency", there are lots of recipes for that. But practically every vegan food I see described as "high protein" is well under 1/3 protein, which is a pretty unremarkable target if you want to build muscle. Eggs are a really easy way to fix that: you can eat a lot of them, you get a pretty good range of micronutrients, and their macros are majority-protein so you have "budget" for other foods. Is the vegan fix just getting really good at cooking seitan with green vegetables? That's (with tempeh and tofu) the only option I've found that's even in the right ballpark.

philip1209 7y ago

Four drinks per day is "moderate"?

scarejunba 7y ago
Four units = two pints of lager = less than half a bottle of red wine. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alcohol-units/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alc...

boyadjian 7y ago

The first of the good habits is a good diet. The first medicine is food.

sn9 7y ago
I'd actually say that the most impactful first habit is regular exercise. Especially a few hours of strength training and a few hours of aerobic exercise per week. You can have a mediocre diet and still see huge health benefits. The opposite is not true: a sedentary lifestyle will kill you and the last years will be miserable with little in the way of physical autonomy.

arjie 7y ago

Does anyone have a link to the AHEI-2010 (the 2010 version of the Alternative Healthy Eating Index)? I can't find it easily anywhere on the Internet.

smugtrain 7y ago

As an added benefit, being annoyingly healthy and so proud to announce your superiority to the world will make you smarts smell so fine, you will capture them in a sniffing glass, just to savor your good habits

cjlars 7y ago

The drink units are weird in this article. Most people (in the US) think of a drink as closer to a 1.5oz 80 proof shot or 12oz of 5% abv beer, which works out to 17.75ml of ethanol. The article defines a drink as 10ml of ethanol. So the guidline for men would be on a bit over 2 budweisers per day.

detaro 7y ago
It's explicitly not "a drink" that's defined as such, but a "unit of alcohol". It's a standard measure in the UK for actual alcohol content in drinks.