Yes, alcohol is worse for your health than no alcohol. That’s almost certainly true even for “moderate” drinkers. People do it for pleasure. A “case against alcohol” that doesn’t address this very real benefit is unlikely to have any impact, except with people who have decided that pleasure itself is suspect at best.
The health benefits of red wine are well known. Alcohol also lowers the odds of stroke and improves your cholesterol:
- Muscles must be stressed and sustain damage ("microtrauma") before muscle growth occurs.
- DNA must be damaged by UVB radiation in order for the body to create melanin.
- Allergen immunotherapy works by exposing the body to larger and larger amounts of a substance which causes an allergic reaction. This process is clearly nonlinear and involves hysteresis!
Ethanol exists naturally in the body, in small amounts (~3g/day), as a byproduct of fermentation in the digestive system. We're always producing a small amount of the enzymes which convert alcohol to acetaldehyde, and then acetaldehyde to acetic acid and acetyl-CoA, and so on. Is it such a stretch to imagine that the body has a feedback mechanism to deal with variations in these levels, and that that mechanism is effective at preventing neurotoxicity for small enough variation in these levels? At some point I think to argue there is no theoretic way the body regulates these low levels of ethanol, you'd just be arguing that living, itself, is neurotoxic.
A drink would be 8 oz (5%) = 11.2 g etoh / beer avg that is consumed in <30m so that's 22.4 g/H or 1800% higher rate of etoh consumption for single beer compared to what your body naturally produces. Due to that, it remains in your blood stream and crosses the blood brain barrier for some period of time before the enzymes can effectively convert it, hence the increase in BAC for that period of time. That indicates that you are not maintaining homeostasis at that rate of consumption. If you drink more, then that extends the time of exposure and raises the level further - so yea there is a non-linearity there.
I'd compare it more to toluene or some solvent you breath in accidentally while working. Sure your body removes it, there are acceptable OSHA personal exposure levels so obviously it won't kill you at that concentration, maybe it gets more efficient at removing it after you expose yourself repeatedly. Still it's a neurotoxin and breathing any in causes non-zero damage.
All this beer talk got me thirsty, cheers!
it's like pruning the dead branches from a shrub
forgetting can be helpful
To your point, what would the numbers look like without alcohol?
Perhaps there is a decrease in birth rate as people make more judicious choices?
Perhaps people move to other, less healthy intoxicants?
Perhaps suicide rate increases because people are less able to blow off steam and occasionally get stupid?
Who knows?
What we do know is that humans are genetically adapted to consuming ethanol, have been doing it for thousands of years [1], and seem to have a pretty fun time doing it.
> It really feels like we’re experiencing a rebirth of puritanism
Sometimes it seems like the issue is even broader to me. There seems to be a strange obsession recently with getting rid of anything that's generally enjoyable.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer#:~:text=A%20....
I'd say the cost to benefit on it is pretty horrific, with cancer, liver, etc all adding up together in the end. I think if someone were abusing Benzos or Ketamine it'd be far much cleaner than abusing alcohol. Note, please don't take this as advice or any kind of implicit approval for abusing any of the above. It's just, uh, nice to not have to lose your liver and such (and I know there are other side effects from abusing the others above, but it seems to be from rampant, constant use, I believe/have heard, at very high doses for Ketamine. Don't know as much about the Benzos side of things.)
"Man doesn't want people to do thing he doesn't enjoy; news at 10"
It's a shame he wrote this blog because at least some of Nutt's proposals seem reasonable.
> A Christian framework can be extremely helpful here.
Oh ok, why did I even start reading this?