Alcohol is never good for people under 40, global study finds | Hacker News Reader

Alcohol is never good for people under 40, global study finds

theguardian.com

64 pointsnigerian198132 comments

That’s a strange study or at least a strange way of presenting its conclusion. To summarise: alcohol is more harmful to young people because the majority of accidents are linked to excessive drinking and excessive drinkers are mostly under 40 therefore all people under 40 should abstain.

massive confounding variables in this study, its almost laughable.

Alcohol consumption is near an ideal case to study for Mendelian randomization, since there are fairly common, well-distributed gene variants which make alcohol consumption a lot less enjoyable.

Since this a known reason for drinking less, and the people with the variants are otherwise similar to everyone else, we can disentangle it from all the other things which affects how much you drink - not just things we can guess, like health issues and dietary customs, but things we haven't even thought of.

So there's really no reason to try to use studies like this to draw casual inferences about if (or "for who", nice garden of forking paths you have there) some low level of alcohol consumption may still be healthy. We have fundamentally better tools.

And those tools have, in later years, essentially sunk the old idea of a j-shaped alcohol harms curve. There is no benefit at low levels.

> Among those aged 40-64, safe alcohol consumption levels ranged from about half a standard drink a day to almost two standard drinks. For those aged 65 or older, the risks of “health loss from alcohol consumption” were reached after consuming a little more than three standard drinks a day.

This part is fascinating to me, because an aging body is less able to tolerate most kinds of stress. What about this kind of stress is tolerable or even healthy for a 65yo but harmful under 40? My granddad lived to be 97, and drank a shot of his "medicine" (schnaps) every night. Maybe for him it was really medicine.

Really interesting question. Maybe most negative effects are caused by products of alcohol metabolism by the liver, and an old liver pumps out those metabolites at smaller rates.

That’s not it. It’s just that after 65, you are more likely to die from something else before alcohol kills you unless you drink more than three standard drinks a day.

Alcohol is never good for people period. It turns into acetaldehyde [0] in the human body, a known carcinogen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde

Microbial ethanol could be beneficial, though.

”Several beneficial effects of L. reuteri have been noted. First, L. reuteri can produce antimicrobial molecules, such as organic acids, ethanol, and reuterin. Due to its antimicrobial activity, L. reuteri is able to inhibit the colonization of pathogenic microbes and remodel the commensal microbiota composition in the host”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5917019/

Isn’t alcohol consumption a pretty perfect natural experiment? Unlike something like fat or sugar you have people who regularly consume a consistent amount that is easy to estimate (ie we buy a six pack a week). If we can’t even be sure if its positive or negative I’m going with small amounts are roughly neutral.

For people over 40, alcohol is a matter of survival…

Just until 70, then you replace it with pills ;)

> While it may not be realistic to think young adults will abstain from drinking

How about making THC widely available and restricting alcohol?

Urgh, no thank you.

From: https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201467

The progression of a long-term exposure to drugs toward the development of substance use disorders and addicted behaviors is often associated with deficits in decision making (Koob and Volkow, 2010; Wiers et al, 2007). FMRI demonstrates altered brain activity in core regions linked to the motivational and affective aspects of decision making (Cousijn et al, 2012; Vaidya et al, 2012), mainly in the ventromedial prefrontal (VMPFC) and orbitofrontal cortices and insula. In this regard, it has been demonstrated that substance-dependent individuals and patients with VMPFC lesions exhibit similar behaviors that lead them to make similar decisions in real life, preferring choices that bring immediate benefits even if coupled with negative consequences (Bechara and Damasio, 2002).

In our study, we complement the functional evidence of altered activity in nodes related to decision making by showing in regular cannabis users a decrease in gray matter volume in the insula, orbitofrontal cortex, and precuneus, regions that are part of the motivational and affective components of this network.

And that compares unfavorably to alcohol use because ... ?

THC makes me very anxious and paranoid

And alcohol makes some people physically dependant while destroing their brains and other organs.

Not everything is for everybody but if half of drinkers switched to THC we might achieve serious harm reduction.

THC is only part of the story. If you change this to cannabinoids in general I'd be more inclined to agree. CBD in particular is very important to regulate balance out the negative aspects of THC.

Sweet, turning 40 soon.

The hangovers get precipitously worse.

Just gotta drink the slightly pricier stuff, leaves less hangover effects.

More importantly, stay well hydrated and you can usually avoid the next-day deleterious effects.

Ya know, sometimes I just want a drink.

I just read the study, that's not what it says. The minimum risk seems to be 1-5g per day for young people, not 0.

One shot can be like 40g at least

Here a shot is about 40ml so I think thats only around 12gr alcohol assuming standard 40% alcohol.

In isolation nothing is good for people. Life is a tapestry of choices.

Sniffing glue may be bad, eating apples may be bad. But when we talk we quite often refer to the most general case. In that case there first option is "bad" but the second "good".

"everything is the same" is not a very useful discussion.

Alcohol is addictive. "Over X per day is health risk" - is it a limit when addiction is potentially created ?

But just from observations: damn yes ! It's daily "traning" what makes peoples alcoholics.

Happy I am over 40 :)

There is a big unspoken caveat attached to that statement which is: if you can get clean water instead. If your options are to have dirty water or beer then beer is healthier for you at almost any age.

Where on the planet is beer more accessible than clean drinking water?

In the past at least, many places; you can make roughly clean water by fermenting it into beer.

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