Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanobjc | Hacker News Reader

I was always suspicious of the magical 'one glass of red a day is actually GOOD for you!' - seemed like a major case of wishful thinking and confirmation bias.

Alcohol is fun to many people - including researchers. This has driven an almost desperate attempt to legitimate drinking in nearly any context. Drinking daily? Good for you! While pregnant? Probably not bad! Breastfeeding? Sure! Just social drinking once a week, but a little bingey? Well that's like an average of 1 drink/day, so it's also good for you basically!

I quote a friend who is a psychiatrist: there is no known safe level of alcohol.

View on HN

This study showed, though, that 0-100g of alcohol per week is somewhat safe. That makes the safe upper limit about a wine bottle per week, or a single beer every day.

The problem alcohol shares with other hard narcotics, of course, is that tolerance builds up and the consumption has a tendency to grow.

Time also. A single 24 hour period of time won’t kill you, but string together 80 or 90 years worth and you will be close to death.

> but string together 80 or 90 years worth and you will be close to death

I think 80 or 90 years of "life" will bring you close to death!

the hardest drug of all is oxygen.. impossible to stop and will kill you most of the time

Just look at what it does to metal in a short amount of time!

See also "Never cross a river that is, on average, 4 feet deep." ad nauseam by Nassim Taleb.

What is the recommended daily amount of time we should have to lead a happy and healthy lifestyle?

This is something I've never been able to find: Hard data on how the distribution of alcohol consumption changes the health effects. If I drink 2 standard drinks a day, every day (one glass of wine with dinner) is that better or worse than drinking 14 standard drinks on Friday night and not drinking for the rest of the week?

>> there is no known safe level of alcohol.

This is true, but there's no known safe level of a lot of stuff, and there are various known unsafe levels with alcohol.

For instance - while it's true that the absolute safest course of action is not to drink any alcohol at all during pregnancy, it's also true that the risk profile of consuming one-two units per week during pregnancy is negligible.

I'm not trying to defend ethanol here - it is a known carcinogen, it ruins brains and livers and much else - however the tendency for bias and monochrome thinking in this space seems to go both ways.

A healthy dose of skepticism for every claim of what is good for you is... er... good for you.

Glass of wine good for you? This message or research was sponsored by the wine industry. Avocados good for you? Avocado industry. Smoking good for you? This is literally what the tobacco industry said until it was finally stopped by legislation and counter-evidence.

With every claim you have to assess who would benefit from it. In the case of alcohol, it's both the alcohol industry AND the state, due to high and extra taxes on alcohol (in my country at least), which are intended to discourage heavy drinking but which at the same time contribute a lot to tax income. The same weirdness is done with smoking; it's not banned because of obvious health reasons, just heavily taxed and packaging and advertising are tightly regulated, because outright banning it would cause it to go underground.

I’ve read that part of the reason that moderate drinkers appear on average to be in better health than teetotalers is that many people who abstain entirely from alcohol used to be heavy drinkers, and may have quit because it was impacting their health. If you omit recovered/recovering alcoholics from the calculation, the alleged effect on heart health largely disappears.

If you want to drink, go for it—for better or worse, it’s often a big part of social life. But as you say, there’s essentially no “safe” amount, just the amount of increased risk you’re personally willing to accept when it comes to addiction, risk-taking behaviour, depression, anxiety, heart disease, insulin resistance, organ dysfunction, cancer, systemic inflammation, brain damage, and so on.

Someone who doesn’t drink should absolutely not start drinking under the guise of health.

> there is no known safe level of alcohol

I wonder why countries that are dry don’t have better health outcomes than those that aren’t

Very few countries are genuinely alcohol-free, many things happen underground, and with unsanitized liquors.

Also, I wonder whether less alcohol drives global happiness up or down. Alcohol is a depression factor but could help creating bonds, massively, at a corporate or national level – so, live slightly shorter but happier?

Because the number of confounding factors if you look at whole countries is so huge that you couldn't attribute it to alcohol even if you found an association.

I would argue the availability of factors that confound it suggest that the effect of moderate alcohol consumption must be tiny

Look at american religious groups such as Mormons or Seventh Day Adventists. You could even go even further and look at the health effects of people who have left those religions and began drinking afterwards, compared to their siblings who stayed in. It would be near impossible to get this data, but you could even do a twin study on this. This would essentially isolate the effects of alcohol, as otherwise the lifestyles are nearly idential in terms of anything that would relate to physical health.

I wonder if comparing different populations in Utah and adjusting for % mormon would work? Provo vs SLC for example

the lifestyles are nearly idential in terms of anything that would relate to physical health

Well, that's begging the question; how do we know that the other differences don't relate to physical health if we must do comparative studies to know if one difference (alcohol consumption) does?

I imagine leaving the Mormons has some effect on your health. Social connections and stress are pretty important.

Seventh Day Adventists are also vegetarian, which almost certainly has health implications of some sort.

There could be confounding variables, i.e. a government or culture that bans alcohol or consumes little alcohol may be likely to have other attributes that lead to worse health outcomes.

I guess there are some good elements in wine - what would be a similar drink but alcohol-free?

Fresh cloudy red grape juice, probably. I bet whole grapes are even better.

In Spain you can get a non-alcoholic drink called mosto - here's an explanation and some photos that make it look nicer than it is ;-) https://youngadventuress.com/2012/01/mosto-whats-mosto.html - it is a non-alcoholic drink and is mostly the grape juice that would later have been fermented to make wine. If there's anything "good" in wine, it is probably in mosto too.

But mosto has too much sugar. I'd rather have a wine :)

I don't mean to sound flippant or sarcastic, but I'm not sure I'd look to a psychiatrist to be an expert on the physical (not mental/emotional) effects of alcohol.

Beyond that, this paper does actually seem to shed some light on what is and is not safe. If 0-100 grams of alcohol per week only decreases your life expectancy by 6 months, I'd consider that pretty safe. I mean, I imagine getting behind the wheel of a car to drive to work every day reduces your life expectancy in a way that working from home every day doesn't. And yet people all over the place drive daily, and we consider that plenty safe enough. At least drinking alcohol is a lot more fun.

Absolutely agree with you on the idea that there seems to be a concerted effort in research to find a way, any way, to deem alcohol consumption safe or good for you in some ways.

> I imagine getting behind the wheel of a car to drive to work every day

strawman! you don't actually know and anyway, one is more or less essential, the other ... isn't?

> I'm not sure I'd look to a psychiatrist to be an expert on the physical (not mental/emotional) effects of alcohol.

Why not? Psychiatrists are MDs.

I wonder if a glass of grape juice a day is even better for you.

No it's not, grape juice contains excessive amounts of sugar.

Not if you add yeast. ;)

The amount of alcohol that makes it into breast milk is very low, and the risks to the baby are trivial. Like giving the baby a few drops of alcohol (alcohol content will be something like 1 part per 1000 or less, compare to lager which has 1 part per 20). Worrying about this should be far down people's list of priorities.

Drinking significant amounts while pregnant probably isn't the best idea though, to be sure, since then the alcohol is going straight to baby's bloodstream instead of to the digestive system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com