Some amount of food/caloric intake is healthy or required. Too much is bad. Some amount of water intake is healthy or required. Too much is bad.
No amount of arsenic intake is healthy or required. Any is bad. No amount of alcohol intake is healthy or required. Any is bad.
Too much of many things is bad. Any amount of some things is bad.
Safe may be an odd term for it but alcohols impact on ones health is always a negative. If we define bad as a negative effect on ones health it may be a better term than safe here.
To take the claim "no amount of alcohol consumption is safe" seriously would mean you shouldn't eat bread, which contains a small amount of alcohol.
No, it doesn't mean this. What they mean is that any amount of alcohol consumption causes some amount of harm. From the research I have seen it seems to be more or less linear. Minuscule consumption means minimal harm.
The implication isn't that you or anyone else should necessarily reduce your consumption to zero. It's that it should not be assumed that there some level of consumption that causes no harm or is beneficial (as previously believed). That is what the phrase "no amount is safe" commonly means in medicine. It is a purely medical recommendation.
This is totally separate from a dietary guideline, which would weigh the risks of alcohol against the social reality of it's consumption. That is the way that you seem to be interpreting it.
Also I'm not the person you responded to originally, but interestingly it seems like arsenic, in tiny quantities, is actually essential to our biology.
There is no guarantee that you will suffer harm from a single drink. What it really means is that any amount of alcohol consumption carries some (possibly minute) risk of harm. This is not, IMO, equivalent to "unsafe", which generally means something well outside the bounds of normal risks that most people already take on in their everyday lives.
If we accepted that "some risk of harm" = unsafe, we would have to describe using the stairs as unsafe, taking a shower as unsafe, putting up Christmas lights as unsafe, etc.
This is not a lifestyle or dietary recommendation. This is not a cost benefit analysis. This is a medical brief that states that no amount of consumption is safe. The takeaway categorically should not be that we should all reduce our intake to zero, which seems to be how folks are interpreting this.
For what it's worth, I say all this as a regular drinker who has no intention of ceasing drinking.
It's a policy brief, not a medical brief, it is pro-abstinence and recommends a variety of alcohol control policies, short of actual prohibition:
"- Call for strict regulation of alcohol products
- Advocate for minimum pricing of alcohol products
- Build capacity internally and among peers to promote cessation of alcohol use and abstinence from alcohol
...
- Prioritise alcohol control in national agendas for health and support policy coherence between health and other sectors"
etc.
Obviously, if you live in a city, you're going to find yourself inhaling smoke from time to time, but it's still the case that it should be avoided. It's not extreme to think of alcohol as 'always negative' but also to accept it's a common and basically unavoidable toxin.
Going to a wine tasting is a decision to drink wine (though if it occured at someone's house rather than a public or commercial facility, I could imagine that the hosts might accomodate a non-drinking partner or something like that).
But not from a scientific perspective.
To call ingesting it in any amount “bad” is way too reductive.
It doenst mean those things were not bad for me. It's about being able to admit that those things were bad for my health regardless of if I decided the benefit outweighed the cost. Many people thing the cost of consuming alcohol is lower than it is and that the benefits are far greater than they are. I've had plenty of incredible experiences without booze too. In hindsight there were plenty of things I would have enjoyed just as much, if not more, if I didnt think I needed alcohol to make the experiences better in some way.
I don't recall there ever being a time when people espoused short drives as being beneficial for one's health.
This is the problem with pop sci headlines, they don't give you context. If one study finds that some compound has potential benefits in one specific physiological region, the news will read "x is good for your health", and vise versa.
Looking at just mortality, we can more accurately say, for those touting this study, "there is no evidence alcohol consumption improves mortality", and also "low alcohol consumption may weakly worsen mortality rates".
However be that as it may I'm not giving up alcohol lol. I only drink occasionally and I enjoy it and I simply don't care if it's bad for me. Lots of things are bad for us.
What's going on here is that the previous conclusion was not "no level of alcohol consumption is safe." The previous conclusion was "some alcohol is good for your heart." All this new conclusion says is that this is no longer the case.
Nobody lives their life off the mantra "no amount of driving is safe"... That would be crazy but it would be entirely wrong to say that, "some amount of driving improves your life expectancy" when this is clearly not the case.
Hence the need for the WHF to take an official stance on this. It's a data driven conclusion, but you of course need to be the judge about what you need to do with that conclusion.
Something can be deemed "unsafe" and good for your heart. There's more than one internal organ. The word "unsafe" doesn't provide context.
Of course no amount of driving is safe—that’s commonsensical. You always have a chance of getting harmed when you decide to drive a car. But driving a car has a clear utility which is non-optional in a lot of cases. The utility of recreational alcohol use is, on the other hand, more akin to joyriding—so similar to a completely optional subset of car driving.
But when I lived in a big city, the opposite happened: parking was expensive and the traffic sucked, so I always took the bus and subway.
Let's not make blank statements about transportation, as it differs so much from one place from another.
Also the comparison you now brought up is again not a good argument: It doesn't matter, whether there are unnecessary rides. The argument is, that there are mandatory ones for people, while there is no mandatory thing that forces you to drink alcohol. Or at least there should not be and in reality there are probably very few.
So if one does nonessential rides only, then yes, the comparison might work. I think that is quite a special case of a situation though, which I cannot simply interpret into what the original argument said. I mean, I am not here to interpret a working version into something, that in its generality does not work as a comparison. I rather read things as they are written and try not to add things.
We could speculate about how many people use a car mostly to be able to get to the location of work or how many people use a car for essential reasons. We are getting further away from the actual matter of discussion though, which is drinking alcohol and that not being requried at all.
I disagree. Just like alcohol can be eliminated from your diet, nonessential rides can be eliminated without eliminated essential ones. It doesn't matter what you mostly use a car for, it's totally irrelevant.
(Far more importantly, drinking is actually enjoyable, whereas commute-style driving is a chore. Considering a job to be somehow more important than a social occasion is putting the cart before the horse)