"relatively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I'm always amazed when filling out health surveys where it considers one alcoholic drink every single day a "low level".
If it's part of your routine you might have a glass or two of wine with dinner most nights. Or a couple of pints in the pub after work. Maybe you never really get drunk, but you're drinking a lot of alcohol.
I used to drink pretty infrequently. Sure, I'd have a six pack a party every now and then but most of the time I was busy with other things.
Now that there's not so many 'other things' to do I do find myself drinking more and more regularly.
One beer to celebrate sitting in your garden at the end of the work day, one glass of wine at dinner, one scotch before bed.
Alcohol is a poisson and there is no "safe" level.
Now, it's a personal decision how much risk is acceptable to you, but don't lie to yourself how "one glass a day is not going to make a difference".
Industry funded studies told us smoking was safe for a long time. In the case of alcohol we absolutely know that high doses are very dangerous. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, after all.
Maybe there's a safe dose of alcohol. Maybe the risk of low doses is small enough to be accepted. But we've been lied to buy poison vendors enough times that I'll take any of their proclamations of safety with a mountain of salt.
I know it’s a typo, and it doesn’t invalidate anything you wrote; but it’s also the French word for "fish", which makes the whole thing quite hilarious to read.
https://www.insider.com/dry-january-drinking-alcohol-could-h...
That's not true.
Part of the harm caused by alcohol comes from the way that your body metabolizes it...into sugars. The whole "a glass of red wine with dinner is heart-healthy" thing has also been pretty thoroughly debunked.
Helps with relaxation, anxiety and even acts as a short term antidepressant.
With that in mind, there is a safe level, just as there is with paracetamol.
Of course, having better medication is, well, better. But not everyone has access to it.
That said I have been struggling with it ever since I can remember and I wish I never tried it. It's very hard to stop once I start drinking.
There’s a chart we were shown in Med school with DALYs of different drugs and while alcohol had a big negative side it also had a positive side which was the only one
If one glass a day only slightly increases your risk (Say a few % points), then it will effectively make no difference.
I mean, you could say the same about riding a motorcycle. Riding a motorcycle only slightly increases your risk of dying in a horrible traffic accident, but for a lot of people the risk is big enough that they stop riding once they have kids.
Alcohol isn't like that. Alcohol is more akin to something like going up stairs or showering or heck, a little similar to smoking. None of these things seem all that dangerous while you do them. But as it turns out, showers are pretty dangerous. Stairs make for horrible accidents, which is why it is so important to have the angle and height right (and even). Smoking, at first, does't seem like it'll give you cancer in 30 years, and may neve "feel" dangerous if you do it sporadically.
And the poster is correct: It doesn't matter much if you have a 3% more chance of dying of something if your chances are properly low in the first place - even after the increase, your chances are still low.
Most people I know have someone in their family or friends who has died because of alcohol related diseases or accidents.
The risks become overlooked because of familiarity and it makes it easier to minimize the risks. It doesn't help that the downsides often aren't immediate: It takes some years to develop disease from it, after all. In general, it takes hours for you to wind up in the hospital or harm someone else - but most of the time, much like showering or walking up the stairs, nothing of note happens.
You're constantly scanning for that one car that won't see you and plow into the side of you, and if you're in the hills a lapse in concentration or patch of gravel can throw you off.
What I mean by that is it's much easier to identify it as a high risk activity compared to alcohol or cigarettes since the risk is an in your face might end you today, rather than an abstract idea of this will hurt you in the long run
If I give that up, how much extra lifespan should I expect on average? A week? A month? A year?
I'm just saying that there is a risk, and people should be aware of that fact.
Someone out there is going to be unlucky and get colon cancer from their daily glass of wine. And they probably think it's just bad luck, it can't be from alcohol because they drink just one glass a day.
(Reminds me of a relative who likes talking about how his daily glass of red wine made him live to 90. I think it's the successful chemo treatment for his throat cancer that made him live to 90, but I'm not a doctor)
Even if that were true, it does orders of magnitude more harm than good, and should be considered a poison.
We absolutely do not want to propagate the idea that it can be heathy if consumed responsibly.
For the other it is not replacement in any meaningful sense. The equivalent amount wont stop your thirst and one cup of grapefruit juice feels like you have drunk nothing.
I don't recall if this was precovid or postcovid, but there was a 60 minutes where they were talking about the impact that understanding the genome has had on health research, but specifically curing some cancers and longevity. They had a harvard prof on there that firmly believed that within 7 years that we'll be seeing real advances (that the public will have access to) on that.
7 years is nothing. You know it's not going to take 7 years, it's going to take 25, but stop pickling yourselves so you can make it that far. I have 45 year old friends that act like they are going to die tomorrow.
edit:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-geneticist-george-churc...
This is the 60 minutes in question. Keep in mind academic timelines. It's longer than seven years, money quote, among other interesting stuff:
> Scott Pelley: What's the time horizon on age reversal in humans?
George Church: That's in clinical trials right now in dogs. And so, that veterinary product might be a couple years away and then that takes another ten years to get through the human clinical trials.
Pretty sure the boomers are the ones that came after WW2, the aforementioned "boom" of their namesake being progeny of those that didn't die during the blitz, Normandy, Stalingrad, and everywhere in between.
I recall reading that the day WW1 was declared over, people were copulating in the streets of London.
People have an urge to rebuild the population.
Boomers had parents suffering from post ww2 problems, problems likely dealt with by alcohol.