4 ms·
Each extra drink you have per day probably takes an extra year off your life
- yuppie_scum 6y agoThere must be qualifiers to this headline, or we’d all be dead already.
- eesmith 6y agoThe pull-quote used for the HN title is because the psychiatrist wrote "extra drink", where "extra" refers to drinking beyond ~2 drinks per day, as in: > Without doing any extrapolation or guesswork at all, just looking at the observed data, we find that men who have two drinks/day more than the limit (ie 4 drinks a day instead of just 2) It's an opinion from a psychiatrist, with pointers to the literature. (I can't tell if they are cherry-picked or if the opinion is widely-held; I don't have the expertise either way.) It starts with a J-shaped curve which shows that having 1-2 drinks results in lower morbidity than having no drinks. It then points to the 2016 publication at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26997174/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26997174/ which adjusts for "abstainer biases and quality-related study characteristics" and finds "no significant reduction in mortality risk was observed for low-volume drinkers (RR = 0.97, 95% CI [0.88, 1.07]). Analyses of higher-quality bias-free studies also failed to find reduced mortality risk for low-volume alcohol drinkers. Risk estimates for occasional drinkers were similar to those for low- and medium-volume drinkers." That is, the range 1.3-24.9 g ethanol per day didn't seem to affect things. 1 standard drink in the US is 14 g of ethanol, so that's about 2 drinks per day.