5 ms·
More like propaganda by Big Alcohol, given the following > Individuals who abstained from alcohol showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed alcohol
by kranner 2y ago
More like propaganda by Big Alcohol, given the following
> Individuals who abstained from alcohol showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed alcohol, conflicting with previous research that has connected moderate drinking with cognitive impairment. Weekly and monthly alcohol consumption, as opposed to daily drinking, was found to somewhat correlate with lower cognitive scores.
- treetalker 2y agoThis is a situation of correlation ≠ causation, because — as all Rick & Morty fans know — some geniuses are drinking copiously just to slow down their turbo-charged intellects. :-)
- anigbrowl 2y agoYou have to put 2 spaces at the head of each line to get code formatting, otherwise your artistic endeavors are fed to the HN paragraph enforcement daemons.
- treetalker 2y agoThanks! For some reason it actually looked correct on my phone when I posted it. I’ve removed ASCII Rick just to be safe.
- giantg2 2y agoYes, let's go with that as the reason I drink.
- andrepd 2y agoGood lord
- danielheath 2y agoThose who abstain entirely are disproportionately likely to be former alcoholics - which explains eg the apparent protective effect of moderate drinking
- kranner 2y agoI don’t see how that’s the most likely reason to abstain. A lot of religious people have never consumed an alcoholic drink; at least that is the case for South Asians: Muslims in particular, but also many Hindus and Sikhs.
- j_bum 2y agoThis type of led to statistical issues that skewed our understanding of the health effects of alcohol consumption. Unless abstainers who previously abused alcohol are excluded or controlled for statistically, their health effects can skew results [0]. Here’s a blurb from a recent NYT article: > Fillmore was concerned about possible misleading variables in the studies: To start, they included ex-drinkers in the category of “abstainers,” which meant they were failing to account for the possibility that some people had stopped drinking specifically because of illness. The moderate drinkers looked healthy by comparison, creating the illusion that a moderate amount of alcohol was beneficial. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-risks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...
- khafra 2y agoAnd it's fairly difficult to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, suitable for causal analysis, by excluding the lifelong teetotalers who would have become alcoholics if they had ever partaken.
- criddell 2y agoThe Presbyterian church my parents took me to used actual wine (with an option for grape juice) at communion. I think most people participating in the ceremony didn't consider that having a drink any more than if their prescription medicine contained alcohol.
- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago[dead]
- mnk47 2y agoSo the Ballmer Peak is real! https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/
- flobosg 2y agoFrom a few months ago: The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search – https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062892)
- luke-stanley 2y agoSome might just be avoiding falling asleep or being even less capable.
- bratbag 2y agoHypothesis: The better you understand the world, the more likely you are to need an occasional drink.
- ziggyzecat 2y agoaddition to hypothesis: and that need grows exponentially with your understanding of the world until a certain point. That need can be reduced to a healthy "Mom said everything is fine in moderate amounts" once you choose to not live by conflicting standards, or rather: when you choose to not support implicitly AND explicitly conflicting causes ( many on the left, finboys & fingirls, law enforcement, ... but unemployed who don't work on themselves or their environment as well )
- jajko 2y agoNot really, you need a coping mechanism with all the crap and stupidity across society, and how powerless truth and correct moral behavior can be. Alcohol is one of the worst ones, you just blunt yourself while still realizing all failures, just temporarily a bit downtuned, next morning back to misery. No solution or even improvement is happening, just basically giving up (or a bit of complaining which is just group psychological therapy). Sports, meditation, maybe even occasional psychedelics steered in right direction, active vacations, good food, good sleep. Life is much easier in such mode.
- AbstractH24 2y agoSo you are saying “psychedelics good coping mechanism, alcohol bad”? That is California sobriety at a level I’ve never seen before.
- samstave 2y ago[flagged]
- monero-xmr 2y ago[flagged]
- bitexploder 2y agoEvery study I have ever read emphasized importance of sleep. Many show grey matter reduction long term the less you sleep. Sleep studies literally use a little alcohol to disrupt sleep. All the research out there indicates alcohol also directly shrinks your grey matter. These findings are hard to believe for sure.
- someothherguyy 2y agoGrey matter correlates with cognition and ethanol consumption, but that doesn't necessarily mean it makes every cohort (age, amount, duration, etc) worse at every cognitive battery. There are studies that show alcohol consumption is associated with greater novelty seeking, learning capacity, etc.
- bitexploder 2y agoI generally think the direction is being smarter/curious first and alcohol comes along. Chemically, I don’t see how alcohol can make you have better cognition in the long run. In some narrow ways, I can see it. Long term is more interesting to me than a peak healthy person that also uses alcohol.
- rawgabbit 2y agoThe study appears to say alcohol consumption has protective effect on cognition. Those who drank had less cognitive decline compared to those who abstained completely. If this is correct, this directly contradicts the other studies that says alcohol has zero benefits?
- resoluteteeth 2y agoA lot of studies that don't control for confounding factors like the fact that many people who 100% abstain from alcohol are former alcoholics show benefits to small amounts of alcohol consumption compared to no alcohol consumption. However, the studies that make more of an effort to control for those confounding factors have generally found that there are no health benefits, so right now the evidence seems to favor the idea that there are no health benefits to alcohol and in the studies that show otherwise it is due to confounding factors. This study doesn't seem to have particularly attempted to control for these factors (it just controlled for specific cardiovascular diseases, etc.) so it's not surprising that the results match older studies that showed positive effects from small amounts of alcohol.