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Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- monero-xmr 2y agoThey never include the mental benefits of alcohol. A night out drinking with friends or coworkers has mental health benefits that last, sometimes a lifetime.
- jononor 2y agoAlcohol is not needed for that to be beneficial. Orthogonal at best.
- vehemenz 2y agoAlcohol's effects on mental health for a population does not depend on whether alcohol is necessary to achieve a certain standard of mental health.
- slyall 2y agoA night out drinking can often result in consequences that last a lifetime.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoI do think this is true, but if you include those times you'd also have to include the nights where it ruined friendships (or a host of other negative consequences). It would be an impossible study to execute, but I do wonder on-balance across long time periods and large populations what the overall net affect of alchohol is on mental health.
- _heimdall 2y agoIn your experience, is the alcohol required to enjoy the night out? I've personally had nights out with and without alcohol that were just as much fun. I'm also very much a homebody though, so I'm not a great sample to really say either way.
- parpfish 2y agoIt’s not required, but so much of socializing and the existence of various “third places” hinges on alcohol that the choice is “do something social centered on drinking” or “do nothing”. You can’t expect people to single handedly overturn the social systems that have intertwined alcohol and socialization (especially for men)
- yaur 2y agoThere really isn’t much you can’t do sober that you think you need to be drinking for. Even dancing, jamming out, hanging out at a bar with friends are all possible and TBH more enjoyable once you get past the early phase where you anticipate it feeling awkward.
- Unbefleckt 2y agoI think we are in a phase of overturning even more ingrained social systems, so not drinking a certain thing isn't a huge deal, especially with a growing Muslim population in the west, the growing interest in health and fitness culture, and in my country, the absolute state of the city on a weekend.
- brink 2y agoIf it's required you shouldn't drink. Alcohol is only good when you don't need it.
- _heimdall 2y agoI'd extend that to nearly everything in one's life beyond the absolutely necessities like food and water. Candy, entertainment, police, governments, even shelter. They're all great things as long as you want them but don't need them.
- throwuxiytayq 2y agoYou are talking about literally the single substance responsible for the most human (mental/physical) health damage out of anything we've managed to come up with so far, and not for a lack of trying. You still have some time to reflect and delete this comment (I think HN gives you about an hour).
- silverquiet 2y agoIt clearly seems beneficial and/or enjoyable for some (not me so much), and tobacco and opiates seem like they do their fair share of damage as well.
- pfdietz 2y agoTobacco is estimated to cause more deaths, at least globally: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/substances-risk-factor-vs-direct-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/substances-risk-factor-vs...
- greentxt 2y agoBut probably has greater benefits too.
- throwuxiytayq 2y agoI almost got pwned by Poe's law right there.
- pfdietz 2y agoThe mental benefits, including significant increase in suicide and interpersonal violence? /s
- kayodelycaon 2y agoIt’s possible to go out and not drink. I can’t tolerate any amount of alcohol and I’ve definitely gone out drinking. Most people have been understanding. If you’re having a good time and encouraging drinking like everyone else is, no one really cares as long as you play the part. (“I would if I could, party it up.”) It helps to know a few mocktails that look alcoholic. :)
- kccqzy 2y agoYou need to find different friends that you can enjoy being with while drinking coffee, or tea, or smoothies, or boba.
- fsloth 2y agoI have cherished memories of boozing out with friends but I would not link this to ”mental health” benefits given the documented onset mental health issues including depression and alcoholism is directly linked to alcohol consumption. Drinking occasionally can be ’fun’ and it can have social benefits but in large scale studies of populations increase in alcohol usage don’t show ”mental health benefits”. I would state ’studies have not found quantifiable benefits of alchol use’ and that can still coexist with claims that the benefits of alcohol to yourself are not quantifiable - which is sort of fair, many aspects of human life are beyond reach of clear metrics. The adverse effects, however, are quite quantitifiable by healthcare statistics. While outcomes vary in different populations, the outcomes are never positive (per current resarch). ”I find a few drinks per week with friends enjoyable” is not a claim that would be in contest with the above. It’s just not a population argument. Some people like it, some can sustain a lifetime of boozing, but there is a non-trivial amount of people who develop depression or alcoholism - and this is not a flaw of character or culture but simply a fact of interaction of alcohol with human biology and neurology.
- jbmny 2y agoI agree with you. It comes down to risks vs benefits, and I feel that for a huge number of people that aren't predisposed to addiction, that don't need to drink to the point of blacking out, etc., it may very well be worth it. I know that my "principled" refusal to drink in my younger years made socializing a lot harder and just generally put a barrier between myself and my peers. Of course, a stronger person could overcome those challenges without alcohol, but that seems like a Herculean task for someone who's already shy and lacking self-esteem. I guess I just don't see it as black and white.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- RadixDLT 2y agodrinking fermented food is healthy, including beer
- j16sdiz 2y agospreading misinformation is good for internet, including rumors
- fsloth 2y agoI think that requires a quote to a research. I would be very surprised if beer drinking compared to just drinking water has a positive health outcome.
- theultdev 2y agoAnecdotal but a dark beer settles my stomach almost instantly. But here's research since you asked: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9966200/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9966200/ It's really not surprising, we know fermented foods are good for the microbiome.
- pfdietz 2y agoEthanol is metabolized to acetaldehyde. Aldehydes form crosslinks between proteins and DNA (and DNA with itself). Inactivation of the aldehyde-metabolizing ALDH2 enzyme (which happens in 50% of East Asians) increases risk for various disorders including cancer and late-onset Alzheimer's. Cancers linked to alcohol use: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-activity/alcohol-use-and-cancer.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-... The American Cancer Society recommends avoiding alcohol consumption at any level.
- ImHereToVote 2y agoAcetaldehyde is also be metabolized by the brain for energy. May be why some people get so addicted.
- pfdietz 2y agoI think it would be preferable to fuel your brain with something that isn't also a carcinogen.
- ImHereToVote 2y agoYou think?
- pfdietz 2y agoI possibly use a bit too much understatement.
- coldtea 2y agoGiven that everything is a carcinogen if you read such studies, but most of it is nowhere important enough to worry about, I'm not sure...
- pfdietz 2y agoIt's estimated in Europe that 7% of all breast cancers are due to alcohol consumption. Not everything is a carcinogen at that level.
- supahfly_remix 2y agoHave there been studies of nominally non-drinking sub-populations, such as Mormons or Muslims, to understand the effects of alcohol?
- fsloth 2y agoThe increase in alcohol usage in a population increases the onset of symptoms of various alcohol related health effects, including alcoholism and death. It’s pretty well understood, clinically speaking. But it’s fun to down a few and the statisical chances of dying sooner are not that high if you follow the generally recommended limits.
- sandworm101 2y agoYes, but those populations are far from completely dry. They may drink less, but do not represent a scientific control group. If you did find a totally dry community, the other cultural differances may well muddy the results too (diet, relationship to medical care etc).
- blackbrokkoli 2y agoDo you have support for that claim? Large, large parts of the Islamic world are not westernized at all — I would be very surprised if rural Yemeni housewives or Socotran shepherds ever drink, or for that matter 99% of people in pre-tourist-visa Saudi. Hard agree on their being a myriad of confounding factors from genetics over climate and family relationships to diet, though...
- sandworm101 2y agoWell, i have family connections to pre-visa middle eastern countries and yes, alcohol is a problem. Thats why they have the rule. Are drugs also not a problem also in many countries despite national bans? Remember too that about 30% of people in western nations are essentially dry (<2 drinks per year). So the asking questions approach has merit.
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- zug_zug 2y agoI wonder if these poorly-conducted studies are properly reporting any sources of funding an conflict of interest, as well as how they get past peer-review if they have relatively basic methodological flaws.
- Apreche 2y agoThe peer reviewers are almost all people who live in the same culture of alcohol. So when a study counts people who only drink 11 times a year as basically abstaining, that makes perfect sense to them.
- djaouen 2y agoI used to drink alcohol to self-medicate my social anxiety. I realized eventually, however, that, because it also lowered my inhibitions, I would do and say things I wouldn't have were I not inebriated. This is what effectively convinced me to give up the drink, as it were.
- weweweoo 2y agoBut isn't social anxiety a source of many harmful inhibitions? To me moderate lowering of inhibitions is a good thing, and a couple of beers helps with that. But with anything more the bad effects outweigh the good. Still, facing one's fears and going sober to anxiety inducing situations is absolutely much better long-term treatment of social anxiety. That has a lasting effect, alcohol doesn't.
- djaouen 2y agoThere are also non-narcotic anxiolytics that don't lower your inhibitions. That was the ultimate solution I found for myself.
- quickthrowman 2y agoPropranolol, I assume? Much safer than alcohol and very good at reducing social anxiety/stage fright in my experience.
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- skygazer53 2y ago[dead]
- FredPret 2y agoHere’s one of the fundamental problems with studying human diet and psychology, from the article: > The best way to assess the effects of alcohol would be to randomly assign people to drink it or not in childhood and then monitor their health and drinking over the rest of their lives. Since such studies cannot be done, researchers instead have to ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over much shorter periods of time. Studying humans properly is nigh-on impossible.
- blackbrokkoli 2y agoThe other being the myriad of influencing factors you can never really isolate. Say you do the setup from the quote, then one group would also be in a special situation where researchers told them to do this thing, and they would tell their friends, or maybe they would keep it secret, or maybe it would make them a bit weird, or maybe it would pave the way for more addictions, or make them more conscious of it, and they would have another item on their usual shopping list, and they may meet their spouse in a bar, and so on — all of which influences outcome.
- FredPret 2y agoThat’s right. Studies will say that they “control for age and income” but even doing just that is probably not possible, unless a) you break a number of laws and ethical rules and b) you have a population of hundreds of billions of humans to study. Humans are very different from one another in important but subtle ways.
- silverquiet 2y agoNot to mention that humans are very different including their metabolic physiology. It's very hard to predict what level of drinking will cause systemic issues for any given individual. That said, I'm inclined to believe the studies saying that there is no health benefit to any level of drinking.
- 4gotunameagain 2y agoIt is not impossible, it is abhorrent and unethical. See Nazi twin studies, Japanese Unit 731, and who knows what is going on right now which will take years to be uncovered..
- jokoon 2y agoAt the army, I remember a doctor insisting on a very precise answer to the question if I was drinking alcohol "never" or "rarely". for coffee it's probably very similar we say "the dose makes the poison" but it doesn't change that regularly drinking a low dose of poison is not good.
- ImHereToVote 2y agoYet coffee consumption is correlated with longer life. Probably the Quercetin and Trigonelline in coffee offsets the supposed damage.
- tssge 2y agoAnd ice cream consumption is correlated with drowning. Many times correlation just doesn't mean that much by itself.
- InvertedRhodium 2y agoThat’s just implies that there is a common causality - in the case of ice cream and drowning, I suspect that is nice weather. It also correlates with serial killers, because turns out no one likes to do their hobby in poor weather.
- tssge 2y agoYes, that was my point exactly. Due to nice weather, ice cream consumption and drowning begin to correlate and it's hard to draw conclusions from this correlation alone. As an example for coffee consumption it could just be that coffee is consumed more in countries with higher living standards and higher living standards lead to longer life. Coffee might not necessarily be healthy by itself, though of course it could very well be.
- iancmceachern 2y agoI suspect it may he a correlation not a causation. People who don't have access to Healthcare don't have the luxury of things like coffee, I bet that shows in the data.
- davidhbolton 2y agoThis NS piece is complete misinformation. This below is by a writer who has been writing about this sort of thing for years. "Tim Stockwell has been up to his old tricks. In a study that was widely publicised this week despite being published in January, he claims - yet again - that moderate drinking does not confer health benefits. The study is largely a rehash of his meta-analysis from last year (which I wrote about here) so there isn’t much more to say except to note the extraordinary amount of cherry-picking that is required to come to such a conclusion. He and his team started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which they added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. They then discarded 103 of these because they didn’t meet Stockwell’s increasingly stringent and somewhat arbitrary criteria. This left 107 studies, but there was still work to do. In the new study, he introduces yet another filter for “quality” and reduces the number of studies down from 21 to 18 and then 15, but these still show lower risk for moderate drinkers, so he introduces some more criteria until a vast literature built up over 50 years is whittled down to just six studies. This gets rid of the apparent benefits of moderate drinking. He then removes one more study and, voila!, moderate drinkers are now at greater risk than teetotallers." https://snowdon.substack.com/p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-on-alcohol https://snowdon.substack.com/p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-o...
- gus_massa 2y ago[I sugest to add a few > and * so it's easier to understand that most of ypur comment is a > qoute the " are difficult to notice.]
- 000ooo000 2y ago>In his comments to the Guardian he more or less admits that he is only doing this because the benefits of alcohol consumption are inconvenient to people like him who want to regulate booze like tobacco... >>“The idea [alcohol has benefits] has impacted national drinking guidelines, estimates of alcohol’s burden of disease worldwide and has been an impediment to effective policymaking on alcohol and public health,” he added. That doesn't sound like he's "admitting to" what your linked article says he's admitting to. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, trying to debunk this Stockwell guy's work, only to make oneself look unreliable with such claims.
- IndySun 2y agoThis has popped up a lot this week. There are at least mental benefits to participating in group activities, some of which include alcohol, and of those that do the vast majority end peacefully with a fruitful, long, and happy life - devoid of any aliments listed. Human makeup is so much more complicated than saying alcohol has no health benefits.
- tomohawk 2y agoNot a drinker. As a person who makes their living using their brain, it's never made sense to me to not protect an important asset. Over the years, most of my peers have stopped being able to do any sort of intensive brain work because of (a) drinking, (b) sugar, or (c) smoking or some other drug. Over the years, the decline in ability due to these things is obvious. I regularly outperform people 20 years younger than me because of poor lifestyle choices they're already making. Society wise, alcohol is the the direct cause, or a major factor in heart disease, cancer, suicide, gun deaths, car deaths and injuries, etc.
- nameref 2y agoChris Masterjohn's analysis of the topic is a better look of the data available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4QzEelRGvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4QzEelRGvA
- greenchair 2y agoIn the 90s I remember the '1 or 2 glasses of wine a day is good for you' message was common knowledge but now appears to be propoganda. I always that it was strange at the time and nowadays that myth has been thoroughly debunked. I am no longer a partaker but I wonder what is unique about alcohol that triggers people to come out of the woodwork with whataboutism and messenger attacks to defend its' usage? In this thread we see examples of people in denial and with unhealthy dependent relationships with it. Or perhaps they work in the industry.
- psd1 2y agoPeople - and animals - just want to get fucked up. You can see this when animals get into fermented fruit. So there's been plenty of time for alcohol to get very entrenched in human culture.
- Unbefleckt 2y agoDo as yet unfucked animals exist in some kind of sober ennui not knowing what it is they yearn for?
- psd1 2y agoThat's how I'd characterise my early teenage years, yes
- johnloeber 2y agoI'm amazed that this is still an ongoing discussion. All of these "studies" have been distracting with muddied data from a very simple, unambiguous scientific fact: alcohol is a poison. By its immediate biological effects, it literally is a poison. And you shouldn't drink poison. Decades of studies rationalizing that "actually, people who drink two glasses of wine a day live longer" and their ilk, have only ever distracted from this simple truth, obviously so hard to contradict by first principles.
- RhysU 2y agoCapsaicin is also a poison so clearly "poison => always avoid" has deficiencies as a model. Hence, studies.
- d0mine 2y agoWhile the conclusion looks like a good general guideline, the logic is flawed. There are things that are beneficial (or even necessary) in appropriate amount that are bad in larger dosage: resistance training, cardio, sauna, sulforaphane, food in general, fasting, even water.. Some of it works due to hormetic effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
- cdrini 2y agoIt's not quite so black and white, since poisons are generally defined in conjunction with their dose. Eg "The dose makes the poison". With alcohol, we don't really have a dose, like we do with eg vitamin A, which is toxic beyond a certain level. And as the article states, there are social benefits with drinking alcohol which could, if the dose of alcohol is low enough, offset the cost-benefit analysis of drinking. > But he points out that it doesn’t consider the social aspects of moderate drinking. “It is healthier to socialise without the need for alcohol, but the benefits of spending time with others is still likely to be greater than the risk from the consumption of one to two units of alcohol,” he says. “The challenge being perhaps limiting alcohol intake in this way.” And socialising is one of the controllable variables that can reduce the risk of dementia: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30367-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30367-6/full... But also: excessive alcohol is a controllable variable that can increase the risk of dementia! https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30367-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30367-6/full... It's a complicated balance.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoGiven the immense benefits that some amount of social drinking can confer on an individual, this really doesn't pass the pub test. Reading the article increases the impression further. If drinking less than 11 times a year is not good enough to meet the author's bar, then whatever absolutely miniscule population of people who've literally never had a drink in their entire life there is are going to be subject to so many confounding variables that they'll be worse than useless, there is simply not a big enough sample size of people who otherwise lead completely "normal" lives, and yet literally never touch alcohol, it's absurd.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago>this really doesn't pass the pub test. How can you get more suitable than that, when it comes to studying the phenomenon in its natural environment ;) I guess it can be a tough crowd when some of the subjects have been exposed to the test material much more indulgently than others. The results could come out garbled, and you could be hammered - - by indecision :)
- LorenPechtel 2y agoNo surprise. Just about everything equating activities to life expectancy has the confounder of whether one can do the activity. Hadn't thought about it with alcohol but it makes perfect sense. I also strongly suspect that a bit overweight being the best is the same thing at work.
- marvinboner 2y ago[flagged]
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- EasyMark 2y agoIt’s good to know that I’m enjoying my vice but not overly so, usually a few beers over the weekend. I think the relaxation and decrease in stress might offset the chemical damage. I’m sticking with moderation I think. My rules are simple “no alcohol during the week, a little bit on the weekend”. I’ve been doing that since college, which was a bit back.