6 ms·

No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms (2018)

33 points by known 5y ago

watwut 5y ago
> They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. That sentence is ... what? How do you suffer alcohol related injury without drinking?
- adrianN 5y ago
  The health problems considered are in the list of things that might be caused by alcohol, but they also have causes other than alcohol.
- 6nf 5y ago
  > They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. > But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day. So 914 vs 918 out of 100,000? That's gotta be below statistical significance.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Journalists are often not great at understanding statistics. That is how we got so many misleading news. 914 to 918 per 100,000 is a tiny change. It might be caused by subtle differences in the two groups that have nothing to do with alcohol. If anything, the study shows that having <= 1 drink a day is basically the same as being a teetotaler. Two drinks a day, OTOH, are visibly worse for health (914 to 977).
    - kqr 5y ago
      Just saying it's a tiny change because "it feels that way" doesn't make it so. When ranting against misleading news, I think your approach of argument from assertiveness is slightly dishonest. A bit more rigorous would be to compare maybe the Beta distribution with a=915 to a=919 and b=100,000 in both cases. Or Poisson distributions with lambda 914/100,000 and 918/100,000. I don't know whether Beta or Poisson are better fits. I don't even know how I'd find out. Abd of course, that's still a fairly handwavy approach and I'd love for someone to show me how it's done for real. But just saying it's noise without quantifying it seems to me exactly as misleading and irresponsible as the original news, only biased in the other direction.
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        In case of humans and health, the biggest variable is age. Biological aging is strongly connected to higher risk of serious diseases. (See Makeham-Gompertz law; this is the Gompertz component.) If you have groups of 100 000 people, but there are just a few slightly older people in the other group, the incidence of age-related diseases is expected to be higher. Then there are subtle things such as "how many people in group A vs group B live next to a motorway or suffer from higher levels of ambient noise". Not to mention the cultural differences (religious fasting or absence thereof etc.) Picking up huge groups of people that are perfectly equivalent is very, very hard. But I am not a professional either. I studied algebra, not statistics, we only had a year-long course in the basics. Maybe I was too handwavy.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
      > Journalists are often not great at understanding statistics. Perhaps, as comrade Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
  - kqr 5y ago
    You're probably not, but the way you phrased this suggests you might be confusing statistical significance with effect size. You can reject a null hypothesis with statistical significance even if the effect size of the alternate hypothesis is small -- you just need a big sample.
    - ascar 5y ago
      Using a simple t-test calculation and assuming normal distribution and an equal split in both groups, the sample size per group needs to be 20 million to be in the 90% confidence interval. It's not even yet in the 95% interval at that point. You reach the "scientific default" 95% confidence at 40million per group (that's 80million total). At a sample size of 20million that's 182.800 cases in the non-alcoholic group and 183.600 in the alcoholic once a day group. At that scale I wouldn't trust my data enough to believe the reporting of once-a-day and not-at-all is actually accurate and other completly unrelated unaccounted effects do not outweigh my testesd criteria. If I haven't done any major errors calculating this (which might be, because it's back of the napkin math with a t-test calculator or my assumptions are wrong), I doubt the sample size and accuracy of the measure is high enough to make a statistical significant claim about these groups. Even if it actually is a somewhat accurate result, it means having one drink per day increases health issues by as little as 0.5%. The risk of addicition and starting to drink much more probably heavily outweighs that. Regarding OPs statement, I think it's fair to assume what is usually meant is "that has to be statistically insignificant for any sample size this sutdy probably had".
  - dagw 5y ago
    Depends what you are trying to show. What it does show is that they didn't find any health benefits from drinking a glass a day, which was something lots of other studies where purporting to find around that time. The actual conclusion from the actual paper is "the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero"
- g-erson 5y ago
  I think the intention was just to establish a baseline number of cases in non drinkers.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  There are injuries and health problems typically associated with alcohol that were studied, but they aren’t exclusively associated with alcohol, and have some base rate in the non-drinking population; to understand the impact of drinking, you need to account for that base rate when comparing the numbers from drinkers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- irrational 5y ago
  If a drunk driver runs into me, I think that would qualify as suffering an alcohol related injury without drinking.
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    If you don’t get injured, you might have an auto immune condition. I’ll take my downvotes now.
andybak 5y ago
> They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. > But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day. The headline is typical for this kind of health reporting. "X is not safe at any level" is like arguing about the slope of a curve without discussing it's baseline or scale.
- gwd 5y ago
  What's also not clear from the article is whether they controlled for other factors. People who average five drinks a day almost certainly have lives that are messed up in other ways. Did they have more cancer because they drank more, or did the thing that caused them to have cancer also cause them to drink more?
- csunbird 5y ago
  > an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer Since when alcohol consumption is accepted as a direct (not a risk factor, but directly responsible of) cause of cancer?
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    for a while. Alcohol is a mutagen (and so is its metabolite, acetaldehyde) and it particularly increases the risk of cancer of tissue it comes into direct contact with. Esophageal, oral cavity, stomach and liver.
  - doomrobo 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer
    - csunbird 5y ago
      Thank you for the link! I did not know that it was classified as a direct cause of cancer, I was in the opinion of it being a risk factor only.
- 5y ago
JI00912 5y ago
Nothing is safe. Everybody dies.
foldr 5y ago
It’s totally bizarre that the article seems to regard “one drink per day” as some kind of minimum. Lots of us drink far less than that!
- djbebs 5y ago
  This. I drink a glass of wine maybe once every 2 months. Would i be better off just drinking water? Sure, but the difference isnt big enough to change it
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    It is all about whether the health benefits of polyphenols override the harm of drinking something that is essentially a degreaser. All mammalian cell walls are made of lipids, after all...
  - mnd999 5y ago
    I doubt the difference would even be measurable.
- mort96 5y ago
  Yeah, 7 drinks a week is actually rather heavy... I suppose this research is going against the idea that one glass of wine per day is healthy, and the BBC had to give it a clickbait headline? Plus, I'm not actually super concerned about my chances of disease rising from 914/100000 to 918/100000 over my life?
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    To be honest, this actually seems quite low. Most self-tests would classify you as an alcoholic for drinking every day; it's quite surprising to me that the difference is only 0.004%
- dagw 5y ago
  Also, and more importantly, they make no distinction between "one drink a day" and "7 drinks a week" or "365 drinks over a year".
reedf1 5y ago
I think it's worth noting the context for this article - which a lot of people have missed. This study was performed when there was quite a lot of reporting on "one glass of red-wine a day", as being healthy and an important source of antioxidants. This is no longer believed to be true, but was (and is still) widely believed.
- alanfranz 5y ago
  And yet the study talks about "alcohol related illness like cancer or other injury" (which kind of injury btw? a car accident?) and admits "moderate drinking may protect against heart disease". I need a citation for the "heart protection vs other disease". Hey, I'm 100% confident that heavy drinking is bad. But very moderate drinking (like, one glass of wine per day, when having dinner), for what I can see, seems to be correlated with moderate people that can limit themselves and yet it helps relaxing, de-stressing, having a chat. All those things are good for somebody's overall mood and health. Stress is bad. Everything IMHO. I'm not an MD or an expert.
  - solaris152000 5y ago
    Alcohol is an addictive drug. Sure, if you have one drink a day it MIGHT relax you. But you also run the real risk of becoming an alcoholic and dying. Given that alcohol kills so many people, it doesn't seem worth the risk.
    - alanfranz 5y ago
      Life is risky. Where I live almost everybody drinks, moderately. And yet very, very few people become an alcoholic.
  - ivanbakel 5y ago
    >(which kind of injury btw? a car accident?) Probably the most common non-cancerous injury from alcohol is cirrhosis of the liver.
    - 5y ago
inglor_cz 5y ago
"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention." (the last sentence of the article)
- n4r9 5y ago
  Yeah that's a quote from Cambridge Prof Spiegelhalter, who generally has a reasonable take on things.
alanfranz 5y ago
TL;DR: incidence of the observed correlated health problem per 100,000 people: - Non-drinkers: 914 - 1 drink/day: 918 - 2 drinks/day: 977 - 5 drinks/day: 1252 Now, it would seem to me that the data is in slight contradiction with the assertion. Unless you're an heavy drinker (5 drinks/day as an average seems quite an high consumption to me. Maybe it can happen 15 days a year during vacation, but I'd consider that kind of usage "addiction" otherwise) your increased chance to develop such disease is quite low.
- mort96 5y ago
  Even 1252/100000... That means that straight up being an alcoholic elevates your risk from 0.94% to 1.25%. I would never have expected alcoholism to be so safe. I could totally see someone make the decision to accept a 0.3 percentage point increase in risk.
n4r9 5y ago
A lot of critical commentary on this, which is understandable, but the study does at least go against the notion that a drink a day promotes general good health (which I have heard quite often).
Sebb767 5y ago
As has been previously discussed on HN [0], alcohol (in moderation) can be advantageous for your social live. Given that a healthy social live is good for your mental health which, in turn, affects your physical health, looking for only alcohol-induced problems might not give the full picture. That's not to say that alcohol isn't bad for you, it is. But it's a bit of a pick-your-poison-situation, IMO. Also, the drinking group drank >= 1 drink per day. I don't think you can take a baseline that would classify as alcoholic behaviour on most tests and still say there's no safe limit. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21884981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21884981
- bakuninsbart 5y ago
  Medical reporting should give us accurate information on medical risks. But for the way I live my life, it is only one of the factors influencing my decisions. Practically, cumulative life happiness is what these kinds of personal decisions should come down to.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  > As has been previously discussed on HN [0], alcohol (in moderation) can be advantageous for your social live. Long ago, cigarette smoking was seen as advantageous for your social life. Even now, with alcohol, a lot of the big companies are trying hard to make alcohol much less a part of business and corporate culture.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    Good point. I actually agree that our culture around alcohol is a bit unhealthy; I tried to avoid excusing this behaviour by pointing the bad sides out. That being said, given the amount of problems the reporting has [0], it probably works the wrong way around: People take away that drinking increases their disease chance by 0.004% and think everything is fine; just have a look at the other comments in this thread. [0] I'll assume the original study did not claim that there's no safe level, since I can't verify it
  - Dma54rhs 5y ago
    And I'm sure it was. While disaster for my health I met many great people. Much easier for me to start a conversation when I went to the smoking corner, asked for lighter etc. Guess it still for didn't weight up the downsides but everything has both sides of the coin.
mypalmike 5y ago
I'm always amazed to see these average numbers of daily drinks among populations. Like 6 drinks a day? Or 8... On average? I can't even comprehend it.
- pjc50 5y ago
  They probably mean "units" rather than drinks, and quite a lot of standard measures - glass of wine, pint of beer - are two units. It implies habit, such as having a drink when you come home from work and then maybe another one later, plus partying at the weekend, which easily adds up to those averages. Quite a lot of people drink a lot in a way that's mostly invisible.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- taway210420 5y ago
  I hope it is OK to use a throwaway for this kind of comment, but I am not comfortable talking about my alcoholism (I am nearing 1 year sober though) with a username that can be linked to me real world identity. That said..you don't go straight from not drinking to 8 drinks a day. The habit usually starts slow and builds up. For me it was: - One beer after work is OK. Some say even good for your health. I need to unwind. - Hey, I worked very hard today. I deserve two today. (fast forward ~2 years, drinking two beers on average every day) - It's not drinking if you drink craft beers. It's being a beer connoisseur. And those can drink a lot, because, err, there's a lot of fancy IPAs to try. It's also not drinking if you "like" that beer on beeradvocate. - There are also bourbon connoisseurs! Let's also try drinking bourboun! No need to cut down on the beer though. (fast forward another ~2 years to drinking a bottle of bourboun a week and 4 beers a night..) So to answer your question, it took me about ~4 years to go from what would some consider to be even good for your health to drinking like a pro. Without anyone noticing. Working in tech also makes it easy to hide the habit. Nobody will bat an eye if you turn up for work at 11 as long as you deliver. You can also "WFH" if you have a particularly bad hangover. I'm so glad I quit and the damage I did to my body seems mostly reversible. Shout out to the /r/stopdrinking subreddit.
  - 5y ago
adreamingsoul 5y ago
I try my best to avoid alcohol. The challenge is, I like that it changes my state of mind, and maybe too much. Logically I know the resulting anxiety and negative health effects are just not worth it, but addiction is not logical.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  None of my business but I suggest partaking in making your own,going to a sommelier course or experience a wine tasting ( possibly close to a production location). In my opinion creating your own poison helps one understand its virtues
raverbashing 5y ago
Studies like this and the subsequent stupid fear-mongering and risk aversion is how we get people afraid to take a vaccine that's 100x less dangerous than the disease it's preventing - Non-drinkers: 914 - 1 drink/day: 918 Of course it depends on p-value but a "risk" like that is pretty close to be a measuring error. I think I'll take the risk, thanks
- dagw 5y ago
  One of the claims the paper was investigating was that 1 drink a day was better for you than zero drinks a day, and for that they found no evidence. They're not saying that a drink a day is significantly worse than not drinking.
  - rorykoehler 5y ago
    It looks like 0 or 1 drink a day is basically the same from a health perspective. Our bodies are designed to filter out unwanted foreign substances and will work well if we don't overload it.
    - jaybrendansmith 5y ago
      It seems that 2 drinks a day is still a tiny risk factor. I say this as a <1 drink per day person. So instead of the fear-mongering headline, I could easily see something like "2 drinks a day has very little significant negative impact on general health" or "non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns".
      - dagw 5y ago
        "non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns" Except that is almost certainly not true and not backed up by this study. The study set out to find the number of daily drinks of alcohol that minimizes health risks, and found that that number is zero. What the paper states is that increasing your alcohol consumption will never lower your health risks.
    - 5y ago
jiofih 5y ago
> For people who had two alcoholic drinks a day, 63 more developed a condition within a year A year? What kind of conditions can develop from light alcohol consumption like that?
exdsq 5y ago
Does this factor in that quite a few "non-drinkers" will be ex-alcoholics in recovery? Drinking in the UK is really prevalent, especially over the last few decades, although it's apparently in decline for young adults nowadays.
elcritch 5y ago
For better context, the baseline "illness rate" was 914/100,000 which is a 0.914% chance of illness per year. The "one drink a _day_" group increases that to 918/100,000 for a risk of 0.918%. Yes, the consequences are 0.004% (or 4e-05 probability) increase in risk from drinking _daily_. It's almost like they had to goose the results and drop out "1-2 drinks a week" groups to get positive results.
- dagw 5y ago
  The result they where considering was if 1 drink a day was 'healthier' than 0, and for that they found no evidence. That was the result they published, not that 1 drink was more 'dangerous' than zero but that the number of drinks pr day that minimizes health risk is 0.
  - andybak 5y ago
    If only that was the message conveyed by the headlines.
- ascar 5y ago
  Stating a percentage increase that is calculated by subtraction rather than division is nearly always misleading. The increase in risk is 0.43%, which is still low but two orders of magnitute higher than your statement. What you are calculating is the increase in percentage points [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point
  - elcritch 5y ago
    When dealing with relatively low probabilities (<0.5%), I prefer the percentage points as they give better context. That context being the overall risk to my life or health on an intuitive human level. For example, one medication I take “doubles my risk of some cancer” (over some ill defined period). That sounds terrible until you take the percentage points and realize it’s still less than a rounding error (or risk from driving in the USA) and therefore its easier to decide if the benefits outweigh the “doubled risk of xyz cancer”. From a policy decision perspective or for larger risks (>0.5%) the normal risk may be better.
emptyfile 5y ago
Amazing how mad people get when these sort of studies are linked. Yeah guys, alcohol is a poison for your body and it treats it as such, this shouldn't be such news.
tyronehed 5y ago
Freshman year of college I drank like a fish. That was enough. I have been a teetotaler ever since and am rewarded with an amazing memory and a fully functioning brain many years later. Alcohol is a poison. I always knew there was no safe level.
thinkingemote 5y ago
Anyone else feel like there may be a new prohibition coming via the angle of public health? Prohibition has historically been popular particularly in the USA, although I think it was driven by moral panic.
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  No chance. All trends are pointing the opposite direction.
- dr-smooth 5y ago
  If the way the US handled the public health scourge of cigarettes is any indication, then no.
mjbeswick 5y ago
The biggest flaw in this report is that it doesn't say what classifies as a non-drinker!? It seems to imply that anyone who drinks 1 or more units of alcohol day is a drinker, so that was suggest anything less has no demonstratable negative effects. These kinds of studies are usually based self-reporting via questionnaires, so the data is going to be wildly inaccurate. Any small correlation is in the data is probably meaningless. The other problem is that the risks of consuming alcohol are different for each person. Failing to take someone's diet into account also invalidates the results.

33 points by known 5y ago

> They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. That sentence is ... what? How do you suffer alcohol related injury without drinking?

adrianN 5y ago
The health problems considered are in the list of things that might be caused by alcohol, but they also have causes other than alcohol.
6nf 5y ago
> They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. > But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day. So 914 vs 918 out of 100,000? That's gotta be below statistical significance.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Journalists are often not great at understanding statistics. That is how we got so many misleading news. 914 to 918 per 100,000 is a tiny change. It might be caused by subtle differences in the two groups that have nothing to do with alcohol. If anything, the study shows that having <= 1 drink a day is basically the same as being a teetotaler. Two drinks a day, OTOH, are visibly worse for health (914 to 977).
  - kqr 5y ago
    Just saying it's a tiny change because "it feels that way" doesn't make it so. When ranting against misleading news, I think your approach of argument from assertiveness is slightly dishonest. A bit more rigorous would be to compare maybe the Beta distribution with a=915 to a=919 and b=100,000 in both cases. Or Poisson distributions with lambda 914/100,000 and 918/100,000. I don't know whether Beta or Poisson are better fits. I don't even know how I'd find out. Abd of course, that's still a fairly handwavy approach and I'd love for someone to show me how it's done for real. But just saying it's noise without quantifying it seems to me exactly as misleading and irresponsible as the original news, only biased in the other direction.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      In case of humans and health, the biggest variable is age. Biological aging is strongly connected to higher risk of serious diseases. (See Makeham-Gompertz law; this is the Gompertz component.) If you have groups of 100 000 people, but there are just a few slightly older people in the other group, the incidence of age-related diseases is expected to be higher. Then there are subtle things such as "how many people in group A vs group B live next to a motorway or suffer from higher levels of ambient noise". Not to mention the cultural differences (religious fasting or absence thereof etc.) Picking up huge groups of people that are perfectly equivalent is very, very hard. But I am not a professional either. I studied algebra, not statistics, we only had a year-long course in the basics. Maybe I was too handwavy.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    > Journalists are often not great at understanding statistics. Perhaps, as comrade Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- kqr 5y ago
  You're probably not, but the way you phrased this suggests you might be confusing statistical significance with effect size. You can reject a null hypothesis with statistical significance even if the effect size of the alternate hypothesis is small -- you just need a big sample.
  - ascar 5y ago
    Using a simple t-test calculation and assuming normal distribution and an equal split in both groups, the sample size per group needs to be 20 million to be in the 90% confidence interval. It's not even yet in the 95% interval at that point. You reach the "scientific default" 95% confidence at 40million per group (that's 80million total). At a sample size of 20million that's 182.800 cases in the non-alcoholic group and 183.600 in the alcoholic once a day group. At that scale I wouldn't trust my data enough to believe the reporting of once-a-day and not-at-all is actually accurate and other completly unrelated unaccounted effects do not outweigh my testesd criteria. If I haven't done any major errors calculating this (which might be, because it's back of the napkin math with a t-test calculator or my assumptions are wrong), I doubt the sample size and accuracy of the measure is high enough to make a statistical significant claim about these groups. Even if it actually is a somewhat accurate result, it means having one drink per day increases health issues by as little as 0.5%. The risk of addicition and starting to drink much more probably heavily outweighs that. Regarding OPs statement, I think it's fair to assume what is usually meant is "that has to be statistically insignificant for any sample size this sutdy probably had".
- dagw 5y ago
  Depends what you are trying to show. What it does show is that they didn't find any health benefits from drinking a glass a day, which was something lots of other studies where purporting to find around that time. The actual conclusion from the actual paper is "the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero"
g-erson 5y ago
I think the intention was just to establish a baseline number of cases in non drinkers.
dragonwriter 5y ago
There are injuries and health problems typically associated with alcohol that were studied, but they aren’t exclusively associated with alcohol, and have some base rate in the non-drinking population; to understand the impact of drinking, you need to account for that base rate when comparing the numbers from drinkers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
irrational 5y ago
If a drunk driver runs into me, I think that would qualify as suffering an alcohol related injury without drinking.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  If you don’t get injured, you might have an auto immune condition. I’ll take my downvotes now.

andybak 5y ago

> They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. > But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day. The headline is typical for this kind of health reporting. "X is not safe at any level" is like arguing about the slope of a curve without discussing it's baseline or scale.

gwd 5y ago
What's also not clear from the article is whether they controlled for other factors. People who average five drinks a day almost certainly have lives that are messed up in other ways. Did they have more cancer because they drank more, or did the thing that caused them to have cancer also cause them to drink more?
csunbird 5y ago
> an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer Since when alcohol consumption is accepted as a direct (not a risk factor, but directly responsible of) cause of cancer?
- Barrin92 5y ago
  for a while. Alcohol is a mutagen (and so is its metabolite, acetaldehyde) and it particularly increases the risk of cancer of tissue it comes into direct contact with. Esophageal, oral cavity, stomach and liver.
- doomrobo 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer
  - csunbird 5y ago
    Thank you for the link! I did not know that it was classified as a direct cause of cancer, I was in the opinion of it being a risk factor only.
5y ago

JI00912 5y ago

Nothing is safe. Everybody dies.

foldr 5y ago

It’s totally bizarre that the article seems to regard “one drink per day” as some kind of minimum. Lots of us drink far less than that!

djbebs 5y ago
This. I drink a glass of wine maybe once every 2 months. Would i be better off just drinking water? Sure, but the difference isnt big enough to change it
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  It is all about whether the health benefits of polyphenols override the harm of drinking something that is essentially a degreaser. All mammalian cell walls are made of lipids, after all...
- mnd999 5y ago
  I doubt the difference would even be measurable.
mort96 5y ago
Yeah, 7 drinks a week is actually rather heavy... I suppose this research is going against the idea that one glass of wine per day is healthy, and the BBC had to give it a clickbait headline? Plus, I'm not actually super concerned about my chances of disease rising from 914/100000 to 918/100000 over my life?
- Sebb767 5y ago
  To be honest, this actually seems quite low. Most self-tests would classify you as an alcoholic for drinking every day; it's quite surprising to me that the difference is only 0.004%
dagw 5y ago
Also, and more importantly, they make no distinction between "one drink a day" and "7 drinks a week" or "365 drinks over a year".

reedf1 5y ago

I think it's worth noting the context for this article - which a lot of people have missed. This study was performed when there was quite a lot of reporting on "one glass of red-wine a day", as being healthy and an important source of antioxidants. This is no longer believed to be true, but was (and is still) widely believed.

alanfranz 5y ago
And yet the study talks about "alcohol related illness like cancer or other injury" (which kind of injury btw? a car accident?) and admits "moderate drinking may protect against heart disease". I need a citation for the "heart protection vs other disease". Hey, I'm 100% confident that heavy drinking is bad. But very moderate drinking (like, one glass of wine per day, when having dinner), for what I can see, seems to be correlated with moderate people that can limit themselves and yet it helps relaxing, de-stressing, having a chat. All those things are good for somebody's overall mood and health. Stress is bad. Everything IMHO. I'm not an MD or an expert.
- solaris152000 5y ago
  Alcohol is an addictive drug. Sure, if you have one drink a day it MIGHT relax you. But you also run the real risk of becoming an alcoholic and dying. Given that alcohol kills so many people, it doesn't seem worth the risk.
  - alanfranz 5y ago
    Life is risky. Where I live almost everybody drinks, moderately. And yet very, very few people become an alcoholic.
- ivanbakel 5y ago
  >(which kind of injury btw? a car accident?) Probably the most common non-cancerous injury from alcohol is cirrhosis of the liver.
  - 5y ago

inglor_cz 5y ago

"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention." (the last sentence of the article)

n4r9 5y ago
Yeah that's a quote from Cambridge Prof Spiegelhalter, who generally has a reasonable take on things.

alanfranz 5y ago

TL;DR: incidence of the observed correlated health problem per 100,000 people: - Non-drinkers: 914 - 1 drink/day: 918 - 2 drinks/day: 977 - 5 drinks/day: 1252 Now, it would seem to me that the data is in slight contradiction with the assertion. Unless you're an heavy drinker (5 drinks/day as an average seems quite an high consumption to me. Maybe it can happen 15 days a year during vacation, but I'd consider that kind of usage "addiction" otherwise) your increased chance to develop such disease is quite low.

mort96 5y ago
Even 1252/100000... That means that straight up being an alcoholic elevates your risk from 0.94% to 1.25%. I would never have expected alcoholism to be so safe. I could totally see someone make the decision to accept a 0.3 percentage point increase in risk.

n4r9 5y ago

A lot of critical commentary on this, which is understandable, but the study does at least go against the notion that a drink a day promotes general good health (which I have heard quite often).

Sebb767 5y ago

As has been previously discussed on HN [0], alcohol (in moderation) can be advantageous for your social live. Given that a healthy social live is good for your mental health which, in turn, affects your physical health, looking for only alcohol-induced problems might not give the full picture. That's not to say that alcohol isn't bad for you, it is. But it's a bit of a pick-your-poison-situation, IMO. Also, the drinking group drank >= 1 drink per day. I don't think you can take a baseline that would classify as alcoholic behaviour on most tests and still say there's no safe limit. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21884981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21884981

bakuninsbart 5y ago
Medical reporting should give us accurate information on medical risks. But for the way I live my life, it is only one of the factors influencing my decisions. Practically, cumulative life happiness is what these kinds of personal decisions should come down to.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> As has been previously discussed on HN [0], alcohol (in moderation) can be advantageous for your social live. Long ago, cigarette smoking was seen as advantageous for your social life. Even now, with alcohol, a lot of the big companies are trying hard to make alcohol much less a part of business and corporate culture.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  Good point. I actually agree that our culture around alcohol is a bit unhealthy; I tried to avoid excusing this behaviour by pointing the bad sides out. That being said, given the amount of problems the reporting has [0], it probably works the wrong way around: People take away that drinking increases their disease chance by 0.004% and think everything is fine; just have a look at the other comments in this thread. [0] I'll assume the original study did not claim that there's no safe level, since I can't verify it
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  And I'm sure it was. While disaster for my health I met many great people. Much easier for me to start a conversation when I went to the smoking corner, asked for lighter etc. Guess it still for didn't weight up the downsides but everything has both sides of the coin.

mypalmike 5y ago

I'm always amazed to see these average numbers of daily drinks among populations. Like 6 drinks a day? Or 8... On average? I can't even comprehend it.

pjc50 5y ago
They probably mean "units" rather than drinks, and quite a lot of standard measures - glass of wine, pint of beer - are two units. It implies habit, such as having a drink when you come home from work and then maybe another one later, plus partying at the weekend, which easily adds up to those averages. Quite a lot of people drink a lot in a way that's mostly invisible.
deleted 5y ago
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taway210420 5y ago
I hope it is OK to use a throwaway for this kind of comment, but I am not comfortable talking about my alcoholism (I am nearing 1 year sober though) with a username that can be linked to me real world identity. That said..you don't go straight from not drinking to 8 drinks a day. The habit usually starts slow and builds up. For me it was: - One beer after work is OK. Some say even good for your health. I need to unwind. - Hey, I worked very hard today. I deserve two today. (fast forward ~2 years, drinking two beers on average every day) - It's not drinking if you drink craft beers. It's being a beer connoisseur. And those can drink a lot, because, err, there's a lot of fancy IPAs to try. It's also not drinking if you "like" that beer on beeradvocate. - There are also bourbon connoisseurs! Let's also try drinking bourboun! No need to cut down on the beer though. (fast forward another ~2 years to drinking a bottle of bourboun a week and 4 beers a night..) So to answer your question, it took me about ~4 years to go from what would some consider to be even good for your health to drinking like a pro. Without anyone noticing. Working in tech also makes it easy to hide the habit. Nobody will bat an eye if you turn up for work at 11 as long as you deliver. You can also "WFH" if you have a particularly bad hangover. I'm so glad I quit and the damage I did to my body seems mostly reversible. Shout out to the /r/stopdrinking subreddit.
- 5y ago

adreamingsoul 5y ago

I try my best to avoid alcohol. The challenge is, I like that it changes my state of mind, and maybe too much. Logically I know the resulting anxiety and negative health effects are just not worth it, but addiction is not logical.

tomcooks 5y ago
None of my business but I suggest partaking in making your own,going to a sommelier course or experience a wine tasting ( possibly close to a production location). In my opinion creating your own poison helps one understand its virtues

raverbashing 5y ago

Studies like this and the subsequent stupid fear-mongering and risk aversion is how we get people afraid to take a vaccine that's 100x less dangerous than the disease it's preventing - Non-drinkers: 914 - 1 drink/day: 918 Of course it depends on p-value but a "risk" like that is pretty close to be a measuring error. I think I'll take the risk, thanks

dagw 5y ago
One of the claims the paper was investigating was that 1 drink a day was better for you than zero drinks a day, and for that they found no evidence. They're not saying that a drink a day is significantly worse than not drinking.
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  It looks like 0 or 1 drink a day is basically the same from a health perspective. Our bodies are designed to filter out unwanted foreign substances and will work well if we don't overload it.
  - jaybrendansmith 5y ago
    It seems that 2 drinks a day is still a tiny risk factor. I say this as a <1 drink per day person. So instead of the fear-mongering headline, I could easily see something like "2 drinks a day has very little significant negative impact on general health" or "non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns".
    - dagw 5y ago
      "non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns" Except that is almost certainly not true and not backed up by this study. The study set out to find the number of daily drinks of alcohol that minimizes health risks, and found that that number is zero. What the paper states is that increasing your alcohol consumption will never lower your health risks.
  - 5y ago

jiofih 5y ago

> For people who had two alcoholic drinks a day, 63 more developed a condition within a year A year? What kind of conditions can develop from light alcohol consumption like that?

exdsq 5y ago

Does this factor in that quite a few "non-drinkers" will be ex-alcoholics in recovery? Drinking in the UK is really prevalent, especially over the last few decades, although it's apparently in decline for young adults nowadays.

elcritch 5y ago

For better context, the baseline "illness rate" was 914/100,000 which is a 0.914% chance of illness per year. The "one drink a _day_" group increases that to 918/100,000 for a risk of 0.918%. Yes, the consequences are 0.004% (or 4e-05 probability) increase in risk from drinking _daily_. It's almost like they had to goose the results and drop out "1-2 drinks a week" groups to get positive results.

dagw 5y ago
The result they where considering was if 1 drink a day was 'healthier' than 0, and for that they found no evidence. That was the result they published, not that 1 drink was more 'dangerous' than zero but that the number of drinks pr day that minimizes health risk is 0.
- andybak 5y ago
  If only that was the message conveyed by the headlines.
ascar 5y ago
Stating a percentage increase that is calculated by subtraction rather than division is nearly always misleading. The increase in risk is 0.43%, which is still low but two orders of magnitute higher than your statement. What you are calculating is the increase in percentage points [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point
- elcritch 5y ago
  When dealing with relatively low probabilities (<0.5%), I prefer the percentage points as they give better context. That context being the overall risk to my life or health on an intuitive human level. For example, one medication I take “doubles my risk of some cancer” (over some ill defined period). That sounds terrible until you take the percentage points and realize it’s still less than a rounding error (or risk from driving in the USA) and therefore its easier to decide if the benefits outweigh the “doubled risk of xyz cancer”. From a policy decision perspective or for larger risks (>0.5%) the normal risk may be better.

emptyfile 5y ago

Amazing how mad people get when these sort of studies are linked. Yeah guys, alcohol is a poison for your body and it treats it as such, this shouldn't be such news.

tyronehed 5y ago

Freshman year of college I drank like a fish. That was enough. I have been a teetotaler ever since and am rewarded with an amazing memory and a fully functioning brain many years later. Alcohol is a poison. I always knew there was no safe level.

thinkingemote 5y ago

Anyone else feel like there may be a new prohibition coming via the angle of public health? Prohibition has historically been popular particularly in the USA, although I think it was driven by moral panic.

rorykoehler 5y ago
No chance. All trends are pointing the opposite direction.
dr-smooth 5y ago
If the way the US handled the public health scourge of cigarettes is any indication, then no.

mjbeswick 5y ago

The biggest flaw in this report is that it doesn't say what classifies as a non-drinker!? It seems to imply that anyone who drinks 1 or more units of alcohol day is a drinker, so that was suggest anything less has no demonstratable negative effects. These kinds of studies are usually based self-reporting via questionnaires, so the data is going to be wildly inaccurate. Any small correlation is in the data is probably meaningless. The other problem is that the risks of consuming alcohol are different for each person. Failing to take someone's diet into account also invalidates the results.