Is alcohol actually bad for you? | Hacker News Reader

Is alcohol actually bad for you?

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40 pointsdimitar72 comments

Despite what I would like to be true, I know from experience that alcohol cannot possibly be healthy for me. Even with only 3 drinks, I feel slightly off the next day, and if I binge and drink 6 to 10, I feel awful. Plus, my memory feels a little fuzzier for a bit too.

I love alcohol and I don't plan on abstaining. But I don't fool myself that it might be healthy for me. Drinking is a calculated decision, that I enjoy it more than the risks to my health.

You're literally describing drunkenness and a hangover, both reasonably well-known effects of heavy alcohol consumption.

Fantastic medical insight.

If I run 15 miles tonight, my legs will be crazy sore tomorrow. I might not even be able to walk up stairs. That's why I don't fool myself into thinking running is good for me.

If I repeatedly bang my head against the wall, my head will be crazy sore tomorrow. I might not even be able to walk up stairs. That's why I don't fool myself into thinking banging my head against the wall is good for me.

This analogy doesn't really hold because if you run 15 miles tomorrow, get sore for three days, then run 15 miles when you're not sore again, you'll only be sore for 2.5 days, and then 2, 1.5, 1, and 0 or whatever.

Where as with alcohol, you can never really strengthen your body against a hangover. And you certainly don't get stronger and healthier because of it.

>Where as with alcohol, you can never really strengthen your body against a hangover.

Actually, you do. A sign of true alcoholism is that you stop having hangovers (if you could call that strenghten is another question). But that's just nitpicking, the running analogy is far-fetched in other ways.

Yeah, the hangovers move way down deeper, like into your soul.

Honestly, that's the best way I've ever heard to describe it.

Is that true? Don't people who drink regularly build up alcohol tolerance? I concede that might not make you healthier, though.

You absolutely can strengthen your body against a hangover; it's called alcohol tolerance and it works quite similarly to exercise! It's why a casual drinker will get drunk/hungover from a couple wine coolers and Grandpa Willie can down a 5th of Jack nightly and barely feel it.

How something feels is not a reliable indicator of how good it is for you. Exercise often feels terrible, but is good for you. Pizza and chocolate often feels great, but is terrible for you.

Incorrect, the reason a casual drinker gets a hangover is because they don't know enough to keep themselves hydrated, whereas someone who is more experienced will absolutely keep that water by their bed throughout the night.

That certainly minimizes hangover effects, but tolerance is why the habitual drinker gets less drunk (if all other factors are equal).

Intoxication does not cause hangovers. Dehydration does.

In this documentary, two twins compare the effect of binge drinking to regular alcohol intake. In one experiment, they both drink the same amount of fluid and collect their urine in measuring cylinders. Only one of the twins drinks alcohol and is consequently hungover, but both urinated the same amount. http://youtu.be/g0JL3Q-lpVY

Not representative, but still relevant.

That's a myth isn't it?

My understanding is that it was acetaldehyde accumulation that causes the shitty feeling on a hangover.

You can down a bottle of whiskey and be hungover and dehydrated the next day.

You can also drink pint after pint of beer which is mostly water and feel hungover, but it's not due to dehydration.

The body uses water to process alcohol.

Exercise never feels terrible to me, and my mind always feels clearer afterwards.

I did weights last night and my legs and arms feel battered today.

Said another way: Exercise is conditioning cardiovascular ability. Drinking is conditioning the liver at processing a drug.

Too much of anything is bad, but one is obviously healthy when practiced often, the other is not.

Alcohol's primary mechanism of screwing up your body is inhibiting methylation[1][2]. There was a study of Harvard graduates that tracked how a few hundred did into their 90s. To quote the study:

"In fact, alcoholism is the single strongest cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives. Alcoholism was also found to be strongly coupled with neurosis and depression (which most often follows alcohol abuse, rather than preceding it). Together with cigarette smoking, alcoholism proves to be the #1 greatest cause of morbidity and death. And above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t prevent the damage. "[3]

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20868231

2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24313162

3. http://www.recoverystories.info/75-years-in-the-making-harva...

I think everyone agrees that alcoholism or chronic alcohol abuse is bad for you. The interesting question is if moderate or light use is correlated with longevity.

...but there's all sorts of confounds there, too. Like is a lifestyle that features moderate drinking more likely to include longevity promoting things like exercise, friends, and financial security?

I am not sure how easy this could be to study-- swearing off alcohol for life as part of a science experiment sounds like a sitcom plot; anyone who goes along with it may not be representative of the general population.

It seems we need more lifelong study participants. No one would have to deliberately swear it off as a part of the study if the population was large enough. Statistically we'd end up with enough individuals who don't drink or rarely drink.

You're describing an observational study, which has significant scientific problems compared to a randomized study.

Sure, you can end up with a lot of non-drinkers, but you will have to attempt to correct for the fact that they probably won't be similar to drinkers.

A randomized study starts off with 2 very similar populations. You still have to worry about dropouts skewing the results, but at least you started off on the right foot.

There are studies that show total abstinence is negatively correlated with longevity and ones tat show it is positively correlated with depression.

It's been a long while ago now, but I recall reading some actuarial studies that indicated that moderate drinking improved life expectancy. Did these fall victim to the same bias mentioned in the OP article? Did they not account properly for people that stopped drinking at some point due to health issues?

IIRC, I recall reading that the over/under on life expectancy was 6(!) drinks per day for regular drinkers. I recall thinking how high that was at the time. Now I wonder if it was just another case of lies, damned lies, and statistics.

What I never got is the studies are about alcohol consumption but the people in the studies never drink pure alcohol but instead wine/beer/whiskey/you name it. Isn't there a chance that it isn't the alcohol which provides some of the effects but rather something else in the beverage of choice? Take wine for instance, what would be the effects of drinking 2 glasses of some kind of grape/fruit-derived drink every day vs not drinking it?

There was some thinking that Resveratrol in wine had positive effects but the studies are inconclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratrol

I could see that. There are tons of different kinds of yeasts used in brewing which all create very different byproducts during/post fermentation. Pure alcohol would have very little, if any of those.

Often studies like this break down alcohol consumption by type. Here is a review of several studies that concludes that "a substantial portion of the benefit is from alcohol rather than other components of each type of drink" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8605457

A very slim chance, alcohol is the common ingredient to all of those drinks. Alcohol is a muscle relaxant and lowers inhibitions, these qualities make it ideal for stress relief. Which is why it is so popular.

Pure alcohol is toxic, so studying its effects is kind of hard.

Actually it's easy but the results are pretty obvious...

I'm not sure the reductionist approach is the best for this. Many people use alcohol to find mates and court, or socialise with friends; both of which lead to measurable mental and physical health benefits.

People who drink recreationally are, in my experience, more likely to eat greasy processed foods and have irregular sleep patterns.

I think that the body provides enough feedback about its state to let you make an informed choice.

FWIW I heard a liver specialist on the radio earlier this year say that all alcohol consumption is damaging, the less of it you consume the less damage it does to you and that's it. He said that as an admitted social drinker himself.

> FWIW I heard a liver specialist on the radio earlier this year say that all alcohol consumption is damaging, the less of it you consume the less damage it does to you and that's it.

All alcohol consumption is damaging to your liver, sure. That's relatively non-controversial.

That doesn't imply, however, that there is not some level of alcohol consumption where the negative impacts to the liver are outweighed by positive impacts elsewhere such that it actually is a net positive for longevity.

Funny. If you talk to a heart specialist, they will tell you that regular, moderate consumption of alcohol improves blood pressure, reduces cholesterol build-up, and reduces the chance of heart problems.

Specialists will tell you all about the topic of which they are a specialist. That doesn't mean that they will be experts in other areas outside their specialty.

The answer is "Yes", alcohol is bad for you.

Of course, it tastes good, so people want to believe these very specific studies. And ignore any of the confounding evidence in the second half of the article (such as the fact that people who drink moderately are healthy enough to do so).

So you're saying "bad for you" unless you're a healthy moderate drinker?

Or are you saying the healthy moderate drinker is somehow worse off than if they didn't drink at all? If so, how can we measure the harm that moderate drinking is doing on healthy people? If we can't measure any harm, are you open to the possibility that moderate drinking is good for healthy people?

I am open to the possibility that moderate drinking is good for healthy people (I am a moderate drinker), but the article discusses evidence that we can measure harm from moderate drinking - there's quite a bit of it in the second half.

When we control the other studies properly (eliminate people who were former drinkers, or are abstaining for health reasons), the benefits seem to go away. I also admit that it would take a large amount of evidence to convince me that moderate drinking is beneficial as a counter to my own fear of motivated reasoning: I would like to believe moderate drinking is beneficial, since I do it. Given that fear, and the evidence we have, I find it much more likely that moderate drinking is mildly harmful, and at best, not beneficial.

Straight alcohol tastes anything but "good".

Depends on what you consider good.

A lot of western societies have been conditioned by the food industry to only think sugary/salt-soaked/greasy BS as good -- to the degree that they'd prefer a ketchup-soaked burger and fries to a home-cooked diner.

Straight ethanol kills cells, including taste buds, almost instantly. The cell death alone is a noxious stimulus without even discussing the ethanol, which I think most people would agree is quite unpleasant. Bacardi 151 and other such ultra-hard liquors are primarily for flambe or making batches of mixed drinks. College kids who down them and swear it's awesome are either lying or still delusionally pumped on hormones. Alchololics who swear by such liquors have no taste buds left and are possibly well on their way to head and neck or esophageal carcinomas due to all the excess squamous cell turnover.

Not sure what you're going on about.

Nobody (well, outside of outliers) drinks "straight ethanol".

And of course taste is a personal matter, but denying that alcoholic drinks can and do taste good for people is crazy talk.

Millions of people can very much discern the taste of drinks (and anything else for that matter), and are not "alcoholics", and yet enjoy wine, beer and tons of other things, including hard liquor (from whiskeys to ouzo).

Well not commercial beer in the US, so you got a point there).

As an anecdote, my mouth watered just a bit when you said "ketchup-soaked burger and fries". :(

With the right balance, those properties in a food item are are objectively delicious. I know it's popular to state that all preferences are manufactured by big corporations but it isn't true.

Sure they are. But people have been marketed to and encouraged to enjoy them without the "right balance".

Conditioned by the food industry? It's evolutionary psychology 101. Fat/sugar/salt was (before processed foods) rare and important. Now it's plentiful but our lizard brains haven't caught up.

That the food industry pushes them to our plates in ever increasing quantities to exploit their "evolutionary" properties doesn't hurt either.

True, pure alcohol doesn't taste good because it burns your throat. Most people drink alcohol in a mix with water (and sugar, flavors, etc.) and in that context, it tastes good.

Not only have humans had alcohol on a timescale long enough to induce evolutionary pressure (eliminating the "unnatural product" argument, which as evidenced by modern pharmacology is ridiculous regardless), but higher-alcohol products are a recent invention and, like everything else including water, consumption to excess is excluded.

It's entirely possible that reasonable quantities of alcohol are beneficial to a majority of people. Eventually, science will tell us if this is so. Your absolutism is ridiculous posturing.

"Reasonable amounts of alcohol" are in fact responsible for the establishment of civilization, right up until the age of civil sanitation. Of course now that we have sanitation we don't need the alcohol any more.

> responsible for the establishment of civilization

"I would beg leave to suggest the propriety of erecting public Distilleries in different States. The benefits arising from the moderate use of strong Liquor have been experienced in All Armies, and are not to be disputed" --George Washington to John Hancock, 16 August 1777

That is an awfully weak argument: "Yes, it's bad. Ignore the facts."

The reality is that moderate drinkers flat out live longer than alcoholics and teetotalers. Fairly hard to come to the conclusion that it's "bad for you" unless your definition of bad doesn't consider... you know... not dying.

What you said does not match up with the article. What facts are you talking about? The article is clear that when you control for former drinkers, the benefits go away.

I am a moderate drinker; usually a drink or two a week. So I would like it to be true that this is somehow beneficial to me, but I am very skeptical of that idea, and the evidence I have seen supports my skepticism.

The article says, and I quote in detail, "The World Health Organization reported last year that drinking can increase your risk of depression and anxiety, liver cirrhosis, pancreatitis, suicide, violence, and accidental injury. Alcohol is also linked to cancer of the mouth, nose, larynx, oesophagus, colon, liver, and breast cancer in women."

It's not clear at all why. Moderate drinkers may live longer than average, but i really doubt your teetotaler statement. - http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705377709/UCLA-study-prov...

The cause is the tricky part. Perhaps moderate drinkers have a more active social live, thus having a larger support group for getting through difficult times. Perhaps they take a moment to reflect on their lives at the end of the day, thus making slightly better choices than their peers (pipe smoking, aside from smoking itself, might fall into this category http://www.seattlepipeclub.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_...) Perhaps having wine over dinner, means meals are more thoughtful, increasing quality of food and improving quality of discussion around dinner, improving family life.

Alcohol is bad for you. Perhaps in low regular doses there are some beneficial chemical effects, but what would you put that probability at .05? .1? Far more likely is a halo of other effects that come with the consumption environment.

If it's that hard to figure out if it's good or bad, then it's probably neither.

Its not hard to figure out. All of the indicators point to it being bad.

Depends for what purpose. If you sense your mind is beginning to work like a finite state machine and you're stuck in an unfavorable cycle, a few good drinks can certainly break the pattern, at a price of a few brain cells. Its good in moderation.

Its interesting that the article was entirely top down driven by statistics, and most of the discussion here is anecdotal.

Looking bottom up from a biochemistry point of view:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism

First there's ethanol itself. Enough in your bloodstream will quite effectively kill you. It doesn't take much. Its a poison and the liver will drop everything to save your life by converting it as fast as it can. It has some tranquilizing effect on the brain which is the likely source of improved lifespan... lower psychological stress leads to lower blood pressure, lower adrenaline levels, etc. Fun as it is to get high, that stuff is really bad for you. On to the first hop.

The acetaldehyde conversion stage is a good strong kick in the liver. Its clearly a net negative for the liver with no possible, no imaginable, redeeming characteristics. Dosing the rest of your body with acetaldehyde is clearly not wise and its quite neurotoxic once theres enough. Not as bad as ethanol, but poisonous, sure. I am a little fuzzy on what causes more damage and kills people, the ethanol in the blood or the acetaldehyde output in both long and short run. Its interesting that kids don't express the correct proteins to clean up poisonous ethanol and its all fuzzy what is meant by "adult". Obviously fetus-grade young will be totally screwed up by ethanol and the immature liver's attempt at cleaning it up. At teen age, I donno, the normal adult response should have kicked in? Tolerance should build as teens age, I think? I think a kid that can feed itself and walk and all that is probably medically safe to drink in small amounts?

The oxidation to acetic acid isn't too awful. Hard on your Vit B and Vit C stockpile. Acetic acid is great for making pickles, not that you'd want to pickle your internal organs. Its none the less less toxic than the previous step (you see the path of ever lower toxicity...) This is the step that's wildly genetically variable across races in our species. Most "whites" have the strong enzymes to devour acetaldehyde quite effectively, most asians not so much, they stew their innards in acetaldehyde, which will probably have some kind of statistical result in the top down studies. Or maybe the lifespan effects of alcohol in the top down analysis have no racial component implying its nothing to do with the acetaldehyde pathway. Acetaldehyde is specifically toxic to kidneys and I've never gotten a straight answer about alcohols legendary diuretic effect as self preservation or is it merely happy coincidence. I'm pretty sure that if alcohol didn't make you pee you'd have heavy abusers dying of kidney failure rather than liver.

Now we're at the acetic acid stage. Very few people die of pickle poisoning from eating too many dill pickles. Then again soaking your blood in it for decades is likely not totally wise. At this stage I'd call it "mostly harmless" and stop excessive worrying.

The next hop is to some funky intermediate that basically tosses acetyl carbons into the right place to join up with the big ole citric acid energy cycle later on. Its more or less on the carb and fat metabolism pathway, nothing too far off the map as long as you don't consume ridiculous quantities (like enough to make you fat beer belly). Now we're at the point where slamming a cup of soda or fruit juice or lard would be biochemically mostly indistinguishable from slamming booze. Of course in the top down study maybe having the time and money to slam a fruit smoothie would have the same top down study long term results, I donno.

The final hop is the harmless-ish intermediate becomes part of the boring harmless normal citric acid cycle. Thats boring and theres nothing "interesting" about alcohol once it hits this stage, other than maybe getting fat. This is a rather normal and boring energy processing cycle.

Anyway thats the biochemical bottom up analysis to compare to the article. So your brain chills, which might help with mental health and stress related cardiovascular stuff. Its a hard kick in the liver best avoided if at all possible. And later on its outright bad for your kidneys. How this all balances up I donno. Frankly if you want to chill your brain a little there are helpful little pills that'll do the same thing without the giant kick in the liver or punch to the kidney. Or inhale some nitrous oxide laughing gas or something. From a bottom up analysis ethanol is not looking all that good, its basically a crappy poison. If it were not socially popular, it would have a rep as being the shittiest illegal drug ever, right up there with drinking cough syrup to get high.

You seem to conveniently forget that the liver is the most easy to repair tissue in your body. We regularly remove 2/3rds of a person liver during live donors transplants and it regrows in a couple of months.

In this thread: people in denial about damage from alcohol.

Alcohol is the Angriest of Gods*

*and also the greediest

Well, it actually exists so I'm pretty sure it (and everything else proven to exist) wins those comparisons.

"Yes"

A whole lot of these epidemiological results largely boil down to IQ. You see it over and over again as the missing factor. People with higher IQs drink more. High IQ is independently linked to better health and longer lifespan, almost certainly at the physiological level. They don't live longer because of smart things they do, they are smart because they're healthy. So from the epidemiological data you get the false impression that things smart people tend to do reduce disease or increase lifespan.

How are you supposed to measure this IQ?

I could be wrong, but I don't believe traditional IQ tests give a significant correlation to life-span once you control for environment. (though I think it's clear that wealthy people live longer and drink more)

You measure with an IQ test. They work very well.

The longevity-IQ correlation is robust.

Can you point me to a source for this?

I thought the problem discovered with IQ tests is that they don't work very well at all?

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... should be amended with "... unless the question contains word actually. Then it can be answered with word yes."

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