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Comment by loufe | Hacker News Reader

I find headlines like this unbelievable. Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality. The Canadian and WHO statements make intrinsic sense, it isn't quite smoking, but let's not fool ourselves about what we're doing. I'm still going to consume alcohol, but I'm not going to deceive myself about it negatively impacting my health, regardless of the conclusion of yet another meta-analysis (coffee has had countless, many with conclusions which are polar opposites).

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> Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy

I have two recommendations for you:

1. Look up hormesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

2. Watch out taking statements like that for granted and embed the infamous last words of "Of course"

Came here to mention Mithridates but he’s covered by that Wikipedia page

But chlorine is also a poison and it actually affects your health very positively: it kills waterborne diseases while not affecting humans at all.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_chlorination)

I can see the case for ethanol also having no long-term effects. Though it is in much larger quantities than chlorine and does have short-term effects, so this is some evidence against it having long-term effects.

I actually agree with you that alcohol is probably bad, but I think the reasoning "of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy" is not correct.

It's a poison, yes, but it's one that we specifically evolved an enzyme to allow us to consume safely (originally rotting fruit)

The first rule of poison, or of toxicity in general, is that the dose makes the poison.

> "Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality."

This is in contradiction with the basic principle of toxicology: "dosis sola facit venenum".

A "systematic review and meta-analysis of 107 cohort studies involving more than 4.8 million participants" cannot simply be shrugged away the way you do.

The human body can metabolize around 1AU (alcoholic unit) every 24h, which roughly corresponds to a can of light beer or a cup of light wine, without damage. This is why (very) moderate drinkers don't seem to have increased mortality

>Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality

I'm not sure if I agree with this view. Antibiotics, for example, are a kind of poison and if used under the right circumstances they can reduce the mortality rate.

Even if we consider alcohol like poison, an interesting question is how much alcohol leads to significant effects.

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