Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnmoberg | Hacker News Reader

I think it's clear that alcohol consumption is a burden on society, but I think the headline exaggerates matters a bit. The relative risk is only 0.5% greater at one standard drink per day, relative to no alcohol consumption (see figure 5 in the paper.)

View on HN

Articles like this tend to leave it at “your risk of death increases” without providing any sense as to what the magnitude of the increase is - without that its impossible to just the benefit-risk tradeoff.

A major pet peeve of mine.

Especially since your risk of death increases every time you get out of bed in the morning. Pass the vodka!

Population studies seem to be pretty useless unless there is a massive effect ie smoking. .05 increased relative risk was the same for the red meat colon cancer paper.

The press release says this:

comparing no drinks with one drink a day the risk of developing one of the 23 alcohol-related health problems was 0.5% higher — meaning 914 in 100,000 15–95 year olds would develop a condition in one year if they did not drink, but 918 people in 100,000 who drank one alcoholic drink a day would develop an alcohol-related health problem in a year.

There's a good analysis at https://medium.com/wintoncentre/the-risks-of-alcohol-again-2...

One drink -- is that one glass of wine? Or is that one alcohol unit?

One glass of wine a day might seem fine to some, and outrageous to others.

With the amount of literature being written about how many units a week is still considered "ok", I wouldn't mind getting a clearer understand of how much is too much.

It's at one 'alcohol unit', defined as 10g of pure ethanol. For comparison a standard 355ml can of 4.2% ABV beer (e.g. Bud Light) contains just under 12g of pure ethanol. A 5% ABV can would be closer to 15g. So the unit of measure they're using is bit smaller than what most people think of as 'one drink'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com