No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms (2018)
bbc.com
bbc.com
Both statements have merit. If my risk of getting cancer per year is 1% rather than 0.5%, knowing this is 100% higher is useful. This is not a 1% chance in total but per year. For context, if we simplify this to a binomial distribution for a 20 year old with 60 more years to live (i.e. we calculate for each year getting cancer=p), the lifespan chance of getting cancer increases from 26% to 45%.
Also the probability of the event is actually around 1% here (around 1000 in 100000), so higher than the 0.5% you mentioned.
Saying "your chances of x have doubled" is flawed because that relies on knowing the probability of x.
Saying "The risk of x happening is n% per day" (or an increase of n) is flawed because daily risks aren't what people care about - it's lifetime risk.
So ideally the information should be phrased as something like "this increases the chance of the thing from x% to y% over an average lifetime." And then the footnotes can give deeper context.
> So ideally the information should be phrased as something like "this increases the chance of the thing from x% to y% over an average lifetime."
I've personally never seen medicine info sheets give probabilities much less lifetime risks.
> For context, if we simplify this to a binomial distribution for a 20 year old with 60 more years to live (i.e. we calculate for each year getting cancer=p), the lifespan chance of getting cancer increases from 26% to 45%.
That would be more useful as well.
> Also the probability of the event is actually around 1% here (around 1000 in 100000), so higher than the 0.5% you mentioned.
It's really a rule of thumb for small values. In this case, I was interested in understanding the "4 extra people out of 100,000" as the article reports it (which is well below my 0.5% guideline) and not the baseline risk of illness per year. Ideally one compares both total and relative risks profiles. I'll be careful to add total risk vs relative risk to my descriptions in the future as that helps distinguish them.
Quite a lot of people drink a lot in a way that's mostly invisible.
That said..you don't go straight from not drinking to 8 drinks a day. The habit usually starts slow and builds up.
For me it was:
- One beer after work is OK. Some say even good for your health. I need to unwind.
- Hey, I worked very hard today. I deserve two today.
(fast forward ~2 years, drinking two beers on average every day)
- It's not drinking if you drink craft beers. It's being a beer connoisseur. And those can drink a lot, because, err, there's a lot of fancy IPAs to try. It's also not drinking if you "like" that beer on beeradvocate.
- There are also bourbon connoisseurs! Let's also try drinking bourboun! No need to cut down on the beer though.
(fast forward another ~2 years to drinking a bottle of bourboun a week and 4 beers a night..)
So to answer your question, it took me about ~4 years to go from what would some consider to be even good for your health to drinking like a pro. Without anyone noticing.
Working in tech also makes it easy to hide the habit. Nobody will bat an eye if you turn up for work at 11 as long as you deliver. You can also "WFH" if you have a particularly bad hangover.
I'm so glad I quit and the damage I did to my body seems mostly reversible. Shout out to the /r/stopdrinking subreddit.
The problem arises when this goes from an occasion (meeting with friends) to become a regular thing.
The body and mind also becomes much more resilient to alcohol as you drink regularly. During my early 20s when we went out to bars a lot, it was normal to drink 4 large beers and feel tipsy, not drunk.
(the last sentence of the article)
Also, the drinking group drank >= 1 drink per day. I don't think you can take a baseline that would classify as alcoholic behaviour on most tests and still say there's no safe limit.
Long ago, cigarette smoking was seen as advantageous for your social life. Even now, with alcohol, a lot of the big companies are trying hard to make alcohol much less a part of business and corporate culture.
That being said, given the amount of problems the reporting has [0], it probably works the wrong way around: People take away that drinking increases their disease chance by 0.004% and think everything is fine; just have a look at the other comments in this thread.
[0] I'll assume the original study did not claim that there's no safe level, since I can't verify it
You mean going for a drink after work, right? Because I haven't heard of many places where alcohol is a part of corporate culture. During normal business meetings it's usually a taboo to have a drink during the day - unless, say, you're in Italy/France and drink wine to accompany the meal. But in many places of the world the smell of alcohol at work can have you fired immediately.
Yes, or at least these are the effects I see. Showing up drunk for work is a no-go, but when going out with colleagues after work or on company parties, having a drink together is very common. Unfortunately, that is where a lot of networking happens; being part of the in-group by sharing a drink will often go a long way. That being said, if you're open enough to join anyway, you can probably get away with not drinking (at least that's my experience in Germany).
I mean, perhaps walks in parks, picnics, back-yard food spreads, and what not.
But, as in everything, "a bit" is good enough, excess spoils it (edit for the obvious generality that is: actually, "a bit" can be bad enough, it's not "as in everything").
The problem is more when one thing (alcohol, cigarette, coffee, etc.) is considered as being _the_ required medium (happens also at work, when informal coffee/smoking breaks become the actual decision moments and you have to abide by it or you're out).
That's disingenuous no? In other cultures, socialization revolves around drinking tea or coffee, substances that are not harmful to your body.
But for the way I live my life, it is only one of the factors influencing my decisions. Practically, cumulative life happiness is what these kinds of personal decisions should come down to.
Hey, I'm 100% confident that heavy drinking is bad. But very moderate drinking (like, one glass of wine per day, when having dinner), for what I can see, seems to be correlated with moderate people that can limit themselves and yet it helps relaxing, de-stressing, having a chat. All those things are good for somebody's overall mood and health. Stress is bad.
Everything IMHO. I'm not an MD or an expert.
Where I live almost everybody drinks, moderately. And yet very, very few people become an alcoholic.
Probably the most common non-cancerous injury from alcohol is cirrhosis of the liver.
"The Global Burden of Disease study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK', between 1990 and 2016."
I don't know of a global mindset when it comes to drinking alcohol/wine that ranged between 1990 and 2016?
Plus, I'm not actually super concerned about my chances of disease rising from 914/100000 to 918/100000 over my life?
Yeah, that was my thought as well. I would assume correct baseline to be "two drinks at Friday evening every week or two". In fact, correct article title would to be "No stage of _alcoholism_ is safe, global study finds".
In my opinion creating your own poison helps one understand its virtues
These kinds of studies are usually based self-reporting via questionnaires, so the data is going to be wildly inaccurate. Any small correlation is in the data is probably meaningless. The other problem is that the risks of consuming alcohol are different for each person. Failing to take someone's diet into account also invalidates the results.
- Non-drinkers: 914
- 1 drink/day: 918
Of course it depends on p-value but a "risk" like that is pretty close to be a measuring error.
I think I'll take the risk, thanks
Except that is almost certainly not true and not backed up by this study. The study set out to find the number of daily drinks of alcohol that minimizes health risks, and found that that number is zero. What the paper states is that increasing your alcohol consumption will never lower your health risks.
- Non-drinkers: 914
- 1 drink/day: 918
- 2 drinks/day: 977
- 5 drinks/day: 1252
Now, it would seem to me that the data is in slight contradiction with the assertion. Unless you're an heavy drinker (5 drinks/day as an average seems quite an high consumption to me. Maybe it can happen 15 days a year during vacation, but I'd consider that kind of usage "addiction" otherwise) your increased chance to develop such disease is quite low.
A year? What kind of conditions can develop from light alcohol consumption like that?
Yeah guys, alcohol is a poison for your body and it treats it as such, this shouldn't be such news.
> But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day.
The headline is typical for this kind of health reporting.
"X is not safe at any level" is like arguing about the slope of a curve without discussing it's baseline or scale.
Since when alcohol consumption is accepted as a direct (not a risk factor, but directly responsible of) cause of cancer?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
* eating fast food once or twice a week
* eating processed meat a few times a week
* eating refined sugar
That sentence is ... what? How do you suffer alcohol related injury without drinking?
So 914 vs 918 out of 100,000? That's gotta be below statistical significance.
914 to 918 per 100,000 is a tiny change. It might be caused by subtle differences in the two groups that have nothing to do with alcohol. If anything, the study shows that having <= 1 drink a day is basically the same as being a teetotaler.
Two drinks a day, OTOH, are visibly worse for health (914 to 977).
A bit more rigorous would be to compare maybe the Beta distribution with a=915 to a=919 and b=100,000 in both cases. Or Poisson distributions with lambda 914/100,000 and 918/100,000.
I don't know whether Beta or Poisson are better fits. I don't even know how I'd find out.
Abd of course, that's still a fairly handwavy approach and I'd love for someone to show me how it's done for real.
But just saying it's noise without quantifying it seems to me exactly as misleading and irresponsible as the original news, only biased in the other direction.
Then there are subtle things such as "how many people in group A vs group B live next to a motorway or suffer from higher levels of ambient noise". Not to mention the cultural differences (religious fasting or absence thereof etc.)
Picking up huge groups of people that are perfectly equivalent is very, very hard.
But I am not a professional either. I studied algebra, not statistics, we only had a year-long course in the basics. Maybe I was too handwavy.
Perhaps, as comrade Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
You can reject a null hypothesis with statistical significance even if the effect size of the alternate hypothesis is small -- you just need a big sample.
At a sample size of 20million that's 182.800 cases in the non-alcoholic group and 183.600 in the alcoholic once a day group. At that scale I wouldn't trust my data enough to believe the reporting of once-a-day and not-at-all is actually accurate and other completly unrelated unaccounted effects do not outweigh my testesd criteria.
If I haven't done any major errors calculating this (which might be, because it's back of the napkin math with a t-test calculator or my assumptions are wrong), I doubt the sample size and accuracy of the measure is high enough to make a statistical significant claim about these groups.
Even if it actually is a somewhat accurate result, it means having one drink per day increases health issues by as little as 0.5%. The risk of addicition and starting to drink much more probably heavily outweighs that.
Regarding OPs statement, I think it's fair to assume what is usually meant is "that has to be statistically insignificant for any sample size this sutdy probably had".
The actual conclusion from the actual paper is "the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero"
I’ll take my downvotes now.
Prohibition has historically been popular particularly in the USA, although I think it was driven by moral panic.