5 ms·
Government sponsored study on alcohol doesn't stand up to scrutiny
- stevebmark 2mo ago[flagged]
- scoofy 2mo agoNassim Taleb is not publishing AI garbage: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=64BtMdsAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=64BtMdsAAAAJ&hl=en
- bpodgursky 2mo ago[flagged]
- benatkin 2mo agoFlâneur psychosis?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bamba890877 2mo ago[flagged]
- newsomix9xl 2mo agoI am inclined to take Nassim's position as true, since it agrees with my desired beliefs: that moderate drinking is quite harmless, or if there are harms, they are outweighed by the benefits. Modern medicine often gives us access to amazing drugs which have, in small print, a long list of associated, known, proven harms to our organs and health. The logic, as I understand it, is that the benefits of the drugs outweigh the harms. The logic is not "that these drugs are harmless and possess only benefits".
- zmgsabst 2mo agoThis is important when discussing (eg) cancer treatments: a treatment may leave you alive for longer but in worse health — and therefore, it’s unclear which is preferable.
- rapidaneurism 2mo agoArguably when left alive your health is by definition better than the alternative. I suspect you mean the good health for a few months before death compared with a worse health during and after treatment. Still I had to make the quip.
- zmgsabst 2mo agoNo — I meant worse health. You die in both scenarios, you live slightly longer (eg, 8 months versus 6 months) and during the overlap, you are less healthy than you would have been. Losing 6 months of seeing family, enjoying trips, etc due to side-effects from treatment just to live 2 months extra, but incredibly ill the whole 8 months. In my perspective: you experienced less total QALY by taking the treatment and had more time, in worse health. Even counting those 2 months at zero, the non-treatment option experiences more vitality, in total — because 2 sickly months at the end doesn’t offset 6 months of lost vitality immediately before.
- burnt-resistor 2mo agoQALY optimization doesn't necessarily optimize for quality of life like it claims on the tin, it optimizes for quantity of life. Would you like 1 year and unknown discomfort or 10 years and a colostomy bag? Near end-of-life interventions (in the US) tend to be unnecessary and leave patients worse off, and it's done because hospitals and doctors are greedy. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surgery-near-end-of-life-is-common-costly/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surgery-near-end-...
- nkrisc 2mo agoEveryone will die. The question is whether, say, two extra months spent in a miserable state is worth it.
- OutOfHere 2mo agoAlcohol is a carcinogen, famous for causing various upper gastrointestinal cancers. It also isn't great for brain cells. Why are these reasons not enough to quit it? If you want something to drink in the evenings, how about a cup of mild bancha green tea andor rooibos tea andor hibiscus tea? If you do, please get the loose leaf product only, never the bagged product, as the latter infuses microplastics.
- arpinum 2mo agoDose makes the poison. And some substances are beneficial at low doses and harmful at high doses. Do you foreswear aspirin?
- jvican 2mo agoAgreed - it's all in the dose and the response. Not even mentioning the selection pressure for us to adapt to at least small amounts of alcohol in our diet, which has been present in basic things such as fermented fruits that we had to eat in our ancestral environment.
- OutOfHere 2mo agoThere is no safe dose of alcohol for the brain. Our ancestral environment didn't require us to live past the age of 30.
- jvican 2mo agoFair, but it depends on how far you want to go down the memory lane. It's not unheard of that Greeks would live until they're 60 or 70yo. That's about 2500 years ago. Not as much as 100s of thousands of years ago, but the selection pressure is still present, and who knows how far back it might have gone.
- preg_match 2mo agoMy understanding is there are no health benefits at any dose. There are social and comfort benefits, and that might be worth it, but there's no health benefits. Also dose does not always make the poison. I did chemotherapy, there's no safe dose of chemotherapy. Or, at least, my chemotherapy. Yes it was worth it, but I will also have lifelong effects from it. There's no safe amount of heavy metals to infuse into people's blood. It's, quite literally, poison, cytotoxic, it's singular purpose is to kill living cells. Yes your body can rebound, but the DNA damage, vascular damage, pulmonary damage, is permanent. Anyway, that doesn't mean you can't drink. But my perspective has, naturally, shifted. Now I view the comfort of alcohol as not a benefit, but a crutch. How many skills could I have learned over the years if I did not drink, and sat in discomfort? How behind am I now? Turns out very behind, and I have to build those skills now. Or become a hermit, but I don't want to do that. Or just say fuck it and drink, but at this point my DNA is so damaged I'll get cancer again. So discomfort it is, and hopefully I build those skills over enough time.
- nialse 2mo agoEven the best people seem to go out of their way to rationalise (their own?) alcohol consumption. As a nowadays leading cause of cancer in many regions, and associated with dependency and other secondary negative outcomes, perhaps it is time to stop rationalising it? And maybe also let off the rhetoric of "government sponsored" science, which is actually most science in many places. Written for views/clicks obviously. So tiering. // Master of Science in Public Health
- laserlight 2mo agoThe following quote is especially problematic IMHO: > For a paper claiming to overturn decades of alcohol drinking recommendations, the statistical foundation is underdocumented and, to be mild, statistically strange. Given that "decades of alcohol drinking recommendations" lacked any statistical basis to begin with, the scientific-rigor bar to clear is quite low IMHO.
- nialse 2mo agoIt's just writing for dramatic effect it seems. The claim that the paper is 'used as “definitive” argument in the medical discussions' seems quite absurd given that the paper itself was published just two months ago.
- jvican 2mo agoI think nobody would argue drinking a lot of alcohol, or substantial alcohol, is detrimental for health. The question being argued is whether drinking a small amount of alcohol is detrimental to your health. This is a different matter altogether. We, humans, have been drinking alcohol for millenia. I'm skeptical to the idea that a small amount, say, a glass of wine for lunch every day or so, can harm us, especially for active individuals. There has been a natural selection process for us to adapt. I believe what Taleb is doing here is of great public value, and I commend him for that.
- epolanski 2mo agoThere is no evidence either small quantities of tobacco or most drugs harm you either. People that want to drink will find excuses to do so.
- flowerthoughts 2mo agoIf there's no explanation of why the 70+ bucket has so much larger CI band, having that dominate the totals seems like very fair critique. At the very least, they should have presented another totals with the outlier removed to show the impact.
- rf15 2mo ago<drug> consumers every time: it's actually not bad in moderate consumption/I can quit any time/medication is always a question of dosage Looks to me like even taking meds for a prolonged amount of time shows you that to any problem you try to fix with externally administered chemistry always has a downside to deal with, too. Please stop trying to frame your drug habit as a good thing, be it caffeine, weed or worse things like alcohol and beyond. Another one of those things where your mental health depends on you not understanding the problems you cause yourself.
- mik1998 2mo agoIt's not bad in moderation. Sugar is much more addictive and harmful than alcohol, and it's also fine in moderation.
- Pooge 2mo agoHeroin is fine in moderation! /s The thing is that it's impossible to moderate one's intake as, as you said, it's addictive.
- mik1998 2mo agoVast majority of adults consume alcohol in moderation, so clearly it is possible. It's really not that addictive if you don't have some physical or psychological predisposition to alcoholism.
- Pooge 2mo agoSorry, I was talking about sugar.
- fragmede 2mo agoI mean, it is. We give it a different name and highly control it, but if you're getting end of life treatment for cancer or whatever, they give you powerful pain relievers in the hospital, under tight control.
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- muppetman 2mo agoI'll drink to that! Cheers!
- sjmcmahon 2mo agoSetting aside my bias about whether my large glass of wine last night was one drink or two, I find the claims in this post odd. None of the issues noted seem inherently problematic, and indeed several are as I would expect. Disclaimer: not an epidemiologist, although I do fit models to data and have seen more than a few epidemiology talks. 1: Asymmetric CIs aren't mysterious. Any parameter fit to anything beyond the simplest model and data will have asymmetric CIs. We often neglect this and assume a symmetric (normal) approximation, but in complex data you really should calculate the proper CIs. 2: The data in the age groups wouldn't be expected to be either fully dependent or independent. Looking at the data and assumptions that goes in, some affects all age groups, some only one, and there's model effects between groups (if you die due to alcohol at 30, you can't also die due to alcohol at 50). The CI size lying somewhere between independent and fully correlated is exactly what you'd expect there. 3. The last complaint is a more fair, but also common: most people who die are old, and most causes of death go up when you get old, so CIs get big when you have to subtract large numbers. More data is always welcome there, but also famously hard to get. So, none of these seem like show stoppers to me, and the way some of them are presented in the post ("mysterious asymmetric CIs") seems to speak to a motivation to knock this study down. I agree the stats methods in the paper are a bit thin, but I'm not sure how much of that is standard practice in the field. But I think that's a case for asking more detail, rather than denying the results out of hand.
- orwin 2mo agoJust for the 'sugar is much more addictive/obesity kills more' crowd, I am an ex-obese. Stopping alcohol as a precursor to my diet, to limit hormonal imbalance and reduce hunger pain helped more than anything else (even stopping sugar, which I already tried. I did both during my constant, 3 year calorie deficit, but only restarted one habit). We don't fully understand alcohol long term effect on leptin and ghrelin sensitivity, but we do understand their short term effect on leptin and ghrelin production, and alcohol is ten times worse than sugar for food cravings and hormonal balance. So please stop. You don't know shit, and stop using obesity to make cheap, dumb internet point that are ultimately false.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoI am a teetotaler with a vow to abstain for life. I never enjoyed getting drunk, but I did love the taste of various kinds of alcohol. I took the vow not for myself, but because I've endured friends, acquaintances, and strangers who were drunk, violent, unreasonable, and abusive, and that all needs to stop. That being said, when I researched my family I found out about the Whisky Rebellion in post-Revolution Pennsylvania. And I learned some very interesting things about alcohol and distilling. Alcohol production solves two very, very big problems for pragmatic farmers. If we look past the industrial-complex production of alcohol today, we can see that grain farmers sometimes ended up with surplus crops that couldn't be sold as grain. They also had massive volume that was difficult to both store and transport. When you have a distillery apparatus nearby, and you can send your crop surplus into this distillery, the problems of surplus, storage, and transportation are suddenly turned into liquid gold. And these are the chief reasons that alcohol production has grown up alongside agriculture, and these are reasons why it isn't a simple thing to just tell everyone that "drinking is bad and everyone must quit". Because you're just giving a huge slap in the face to grain farmers (or potato farmers of Russia or whatever they may be contributing.) That is why today, I have nothing against drinking in moderation and drinking for pleasure or enjoyment; it is a venerable part of any economy, and it is really something that needs to be cherished and preserved.