Hacker News Reader

Just plain wrong. Sugar is also "poison", right? For every study that shows a negative effect from wine, you can find one that shows a benefit to mortality. Leave your vendetta against alcohol out of this - epidemiological studies in this area are very low quality and don't show causation in any way.

View on HN

Yes, sugar is basically poison, especially the large quantities of processed sugars that we regularly comsume. Cutting out candy, soda, sugar-in-coffee, etc. can bring a lot of very noticeable benefits if you were consuming them every day.

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.

It's not just the glass of red wine for resveratrol. There are epidemiological pointers to a reduction in risk of heart disease from drinking wine, and these links are generally of the same "quality" as these cancer-alcohol studies. That is to say, they're all bad quality, but if you're going to tout the "risks" you can't ignore the "benefits".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com