Light-to-moderate drinking tied to lower risk of heart attack and death | Hacker News Reader

Light-to-moderate drinking tied to lower risk of heart attack and death

reuters.com

23 pointsleephillips54 comments

Isn’t the problem with these studies that people that drink no alcohol are often not doing so because of bad health or because they were alcoholics?

e.g.: https://time.com/5376552/how-much-alcohol-to-drink-study/

Possibly, or a myriad of other factors as well, which is why designing proper control/test groups is extremely difficult.

This study is only looking at people with heart disease -- not healthy individuals.

Still, there's confounders. The people who had heart disease and drank more probably have a more active social life than those with heart disease who don't drink.

Of course. There are lots of potential reasons.

The most obvious to me is that alcohol is a blood thinner, much like aspirin, which is known to be beneficial to people with heart disease.

Note that the maximum benefit was found to be only a single drink a day - not a large dose.

People who drink in moderation likely also eat bad food in moderation, or smoke in moderation, or argue with their partner in moderation, or work in moderation, or stress in moderation or all sorts of other things over their lifetime.

The blood thinning does sound like an interesting point but it's still really hard to see this as evidence without accounting for factors unknown.

A lot of things cause heart disease and those things in more moderation probably stave of off future problems.

Read the study. Heavy drinkers with heart disease also had lower risks than non-drinkers with heart disease.

It’s just that moderate drinkers were the group with the largest reduction in risk.

> Note that the maximum benefit was found to be only a single drink a day - not a large dose.

Maybe it's just me, but a drink a day seems like a worryingly large dose.

People with heart disease can’t also have been alcoholics or quit drinking due to other health concerns?

The study separated out "never drinkers" from "former drinkers" to address this bias.

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

Vast majority of Muslims don't drink due to religion, shouldn't that provide big enough sample size to definitely decide if light drinking is good or bad.

Vast majority of Muslims also smoke a lot.

There's a truly stupendous amount of generalization going on in this thread, is there any evidence for this?

Smoking rates in OIC countries?

It's absolutely not the case that a "vast majority" of Muslims live in OIC countries. If that's what was meant, they should have said that.

Check the stats for "largest Muslim country by population" (12%+ of world Muslim pop)followed by "% smoking men in Indonesia" (63%+) to see where that particular generalisation comes from. Live next door and it's pretty sad, even before covid came along and added to the risks

So your argument is that 63% of 12% constitutes a "vast majority"? That seems pretty tenuous.

It might be better to avoid making sweeping generalizations about a religion with on the order of 2 billion adherents as if it were some kind of monolith.

Edit: also the prevalence of women in Indonesia smoking is between 2% and 6% depending on what population you're looking at.

https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/8/3/327

I read "vast majority" as hyperbole. The smoking rate is far higher in Muslim countries than Western though—for men.

Even then it's not really true. I'll grant there's a significant outlier of Indonesia, but after that it's places like China, Russia, and eastern Europe that lead the way.

I'm also not sure why you'd care whether it's men or women doing the smoking, given that the data shows that the risks are similar. If you correctly include the whole adult population, there are no "Muslim" countries other than Indonesia in the top 10. This is just a pejorative and it really needs to be quashed.

The top 10 is: Kiribati, Montenegro, Greece, Timor, Nauru, Indonesia, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Chile

https://ourworldindata.org/smoking#prevalence-of-smoking-acr...

It seems it should be easy to control for it.

Link to the study- https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

>In summary, our study shows that an alcohol intake up to about 105g a week is associated with lower risks of both mortality and subsequent cardiovascular events among CVD patients.

>Our findings therefore indicate that, for secondary prevention of CVD, current drinkers may not need to stop drinking but should be informed that lower levels of intake (up to 105g/week) may be associated with reduced risks. However, non-drinking patients should not be encouraged to take up light drinking because of well-known adverse effects on other health outcomes, such as cancers [79].

And no one is going to remember to include that cancer part.

Even if the benefits are real (which is really dubious as most observational studies should be carefully reviewed!), most important is this:

> Ding cautioned that non-drinking individuals should not be encouraged to take up light drinking because of known adverse effects on other health outcomes, such as cancers.

The mental health implications are also difficult to quantify.

I would also guess most people who develop alcohol addiction did not understand their risk factors when they first started drinking.

Thing is, light-to-moderate drinking implies that nothing really bad happened in your live. Most of the people who have cancer either stop drinking or become heavy drinker. Same with a heart attack and so on.

However, the reason we hear again and again about these studies is, that both scientist at a prestigious institution and journalist at a prestigious publication implies that not much really bad has happened in your live, which in turn implies light to moderate drinking.

> who have cancer either stop drinking or become heavy drinker

Is there any evidence for this? It doesn't match my experience at all.

I think you're onto something. Substance abuse typically correlates with stress. I would be surprised if a generally moderate lifestyle weren't associated with both an overall lower rate of significant stressors (poverty, health complications, high-stress job, etc.) and with generally improved health related behaviours and health outcomes.

"Notably, with older age of the study participants comes increased likelihood for drinkers to become former drinkers, which might exacerbate the “sick quitters” bias (i.e. when the non-drinking reference group also includes former drinkers who have stopped drinking due to poor health) as discussed above"

Bunch of nonsense. People that stopped drinking because of poor health are in the study. The ones who felt better drank because they were up to it.

Who funded this study?

In other news:

Drinking any amount of alcohol causes damage to the brain, study finds

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/drinking-alcohol-causes-dama...

Just a little brain damage may be good for you?

Abstinence is easier than moderation.

My point is simple here - if you or your family has a history of alcoholism, abstinence is the better way out. Moderation is harder than you think especially the way alcohol impairs your judgement. But for those who can practice moderation, power to you.

I’d find it hard not to moderate: drinking every day makes me feel like shit and puts me off alcohol.

But fuck the UK drinking culture I remember a 16 year old laughing at going to the US and someone thinking a litre pitcher of beer was a lot and one was enough. Terms like “lightweight” and “what’s wrong with you” if you drink water between vodkas and beers.

If you turn red after only half of one drink, consider: "people who inherit a deficiency in an enzyme that metabolizes alcohol have been found to have substantially increased risks of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma if they consume alcohol" [1]

Wu C, Wang Z, Song X, et al. Joint analysis of three genome-wide association studies of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in Chinese populations. Nature Genetics 2014; 46(9):1001-1006.

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...

These types of studies seem to flip flop every so often to allow anyone to justify what they want to do instead of being open to learning to take a look at improving any behaviour they may have.

The link to the actual study appears to be broken. It's interesting that they've found the largest effect by far in people who drink the equivalent of 3 bottles of weak beer per week. It would be good to know how many people in the study fell in this category. If a small percentage then it could be a statistical fallacy due to small samples having larger variances.

Before anyone decides to drink alcohol as if it were a supplement hear me out.

Alcohol in every continent has a rich social element to sharing it. It could very well be that the fabric of society around which revolves alcohol consumption determines these benefits more so than the alcohol consumption itself.

It might well be that regularly seeing friends, a ritual as ancient as humanity itself, could be responsible for these healing effects. Friends are good for you!

Disclaimer: I've never drank.

I don't understand this tho - why is alcohol talked about as if not drinking prevents you from hanging with friends? I don't drink and regularly see my friends who do while they're drinking. I usually just get a virgin seltzer at bars personally.

Are there people incapable of socializing without drinking?

A lot of social gatherings involve drinking, especially in the earlier parts of your life (like college). If you have the right friend group and/or are more of a social butterfly, you can get by without drinking, but it definitely helps a lot with bonding.

I do drink now, but spent my 20s as the official DD of every group I was with and went out with them quite often. Not drinking does not, as a rule, prevent hanging out with friends.

However, in alcohol heavy situations, it can be off putting for a lot of people to remain sober. It’s hard to be part of the group above a certain drunkenness level if you’re still sober. Not impossible, but hard.

You're missing the point, which is that alcohol use is positively correlated with the tendency to see friends socially, which could explain the finding being reported here.

Nobody is saying that it's an iron clad relationship and not drinking is preventing you from seeing friends.

> alcohol use is positively correlated with the tendency to see friends socially

Is there evidence for this, or is this just a gut feeling? I don't see my non-drinking friends less than my drinking ones. I had plenty of college friends who didn't drink and took great pleasure in messing with their inebriated classmates.

It's an alternative hypothesis that aligns with current evidence, hence the discord.

I have seen no evidence posted that corroborates this hypothesis. It's also pretty clearly not stated as a hypothesis, but rather as a fact which the upstream poster is "missing".

Appearances aside, until evidence or logic aligns beyond refutation, all assertions are simply hypotheses.

I can tell you from experience that the drinking friends did not look upon the non-drinking friends as fondly in all cases.

It's social lubricant. It helps to make things less awkward.

I went to the age of 35 without drinking (formerly part of a high-demand religion). I can say from experience that social bonding feels a bit stronger with light inebriation.

> … why is alcohol talked about as if not drinking prevents you from hanging with friends?

I don’t think anyone is saying this at all.

I wouldn’t say I’m incapable of it, but, to quote Hemingway,

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”

When I'm with my friends, I can have a great time without alcohol. When I'm with my workmates and in similar scenarios, it helps to make this semi-forced situation a bit more pleasant.

Observational study. Useful sometimes, but remember its limits.

(This is your regular reminder that correlation != causation.)

Even if the opposite were true and alcohol was profoundly destructive, it is still part of a dominant evolutionary strategy. Sure, on an individual level it lengthens or shortens my lifespan, but it also improves the attractiveness of myself and others. People who criticize alcohol for social problems forget they probably wouldn't exist without it, so net-net, skol!

... controlling for the higher camaraderie and socializing typically enjoyed by such drinkers?

So how much tequila is 6g in a measure that I can understand?

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