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That does not support the claim that avoiding or stopping drinking lightly/socially will make you less likely to die or less likely to have disease. Drinking at
by TaupeRanger 4y ago
That does not support the claim that avoiding or stopping drinking lightly/socially will make you less likely to die or less likely to have disease. Drinking at all is associated with other unhealthy behaviors, alcohol drinking is just easy to tease out of data, but not necessarily causal. If you are a healthy person with healthy behaviors who drinks lightly (probably almost everyone reading this thread), there is no evidence that mortality or morbidity are increased with light drinking.
- jnovek 4y agoYou really believe that light alcohol consumption carries no risk? For example, no one has ever, in the history of humans, had a single beer which has impaired them enough to get into a fatal crash? Even a single such accident would raise the impact of alcohol above the baseline by some tiny amount. Perhaps the impact is minimal but it certainly exists.
- TaupeRanger 4y agoI didn't claim that. We are talking about population level trends, not individual anecdotes. The question is: does light drinking cause people to live shorter or worse lives overall? The answer is: we have no idea, and the answer may be that it has the opposite effect.
- lazyasciiart 4y agoYou have no idea of the actual baseline though. Perhaps the effects of one glass of alcohol on blood pressure and some random internal protein already give light drinkers an average extra three days of lifespan, which would far outweigh your one time a beer killed someone.
- lupire 4y agoSomeone in history has also teetotaled, failed to make friendships, and died choking on a piece of food while sitting at home alone.
- rowanG077 4y agoI'm not sure what your point is. Yes if humans wouldn't need to eat to survive it would obviously be better to never eat anything.
- pjerem 4y agoThe point is about the "social lubricant" role of alcohol. We may like it or not, but since prehistory, alcohol helped groups, friendships and couples to spawn from nothing. It is reasonable to ask if being sober and lonely at home is healthier than making social connections that alcohol helps to create and maintain.
- rowanG077 4y agoThat's a pretty strong claim there. Yes you are right that alcohol has a role a social lubricant. But to claim not having leads to being lonely at home is extreme.
- pjerem 4y agoI didn’t claim that it was a binary choice. I just claimed that non socialized people do exist and that they could benefit from alcohol.
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoI'm sober and making social connections plenty fine
- pjerem 4y agoI’m absolutely not implying in any way that alcohol is needed to make social connections. It’s just a fact, either in scientific research and historical research, that it helps tremendously. You are fine and that’s nice. But my thinking was about people who struggles to socialize and suffer from it. From a health perspective, are those people better alone at home or should they profit from the alcohol properties, even at moderate doses to create better connections ? The question is important because socialization is important for your health. It greatly reduces stress and anxiety, it improves self confidence, and more generally, it gives you more luck in life. COVID lockdowns impacts on mental health are real, for example. You seem to don’t drink alcohol (which, again, is perfect) so maybe you don’t know that its social lubricant effects (making shy people talk without anxiety, if you want) are effective at really low dose, way before being drunk.