When did people stop being drunk all the time? | Hacker News Reader

When did people stop being drunk all the time?

lefineder.substack.com

379 pointsprismatic676 comments

Modern people drunk a lot, event recently. In France, 80 years ago, kids would drink wine at school.

Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it.

But I think other factors came at play:

- Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wine-...

- Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.

- Moving to a service based society. If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less.

- Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.

Depends on your definition of "children". France only banned alcohol in lycées in 1981... only 42 years ago.

Otherwise, you are right. The main ban (children under the age of 14) was in 1956, or 67 years ago.

Is Alcohol banned in the french equivalent of a high school?

It certainly is not here in Austria. 17 year olds drinking beer between their late afternoon classes is not unheard of and often tolerated.

Lycée would be the equivalent of high-school, with a typical age of 15-18 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education_in_France).

Why would it not be tolerated? They are almost grown up. If they are considered mature enough to make their driver's license, why wouldn't they be allowed to drink?

They're also old enough to have sex, but they probably aren't supposed to do that at school.

> 17 year olds drinking beer between their late afternoon classes is not unheard of and often tolerated.

Well, it's between classes, in their free time.

Not clear if they're doing it at school or outside of school. If the latter, the analogy doesn't apply.

> If they are considered mature enough to make their driver's license, why wouldn't they be allowed to drink?

Don't know, seems natural to me, since I've grown up with that mindset but not all nations agree on that.

That main ban is for purchasing alcoholic beverages. Adults in France can buy alcohol and serve it legally to their children. Same in Belgium, until 2010 it was even allowed to serve drinks to children in bars providing that adults where present and buying the drinks.

I don't get some countries or people that forbid alcohol until you are 18 or 21. I drank beer when I was 8 and got totally drunk at 14. Which was a good thing, because it was at home and, well, lesson learned. Starting with alcohol when going out at 18 or 21 sounds much more dangerous.

Many states and provinces in north America have similar provisions, just fyi.

The important thing is getting even mildly drunk, even once only, before you are confident driving. 5 years as in the US are way too much as you will confidently drive drunk without understanding the effect.

In other countries you will probably be drunk for the first time around the time you're taking driving lessons, or earlier.

In North America drunk driving is a huge problem. You can't get anywhere without driving a car so if you're drinking and not in your house you have to drive home.

Social pressure/not yet fully formed brain etc. leads to ppl under 21 being more likely to drive drunk. That's the rationale for not being able to drink until 21.

"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that minimum drinking age laws have saved more than 31,000 lives from 1975 to 2017"

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...

Wow I would have thought this saved more than a thousand lives a year, thats like a rounding error with the amount of deaths overall a year. Then take into account probably a lot more underage kids get their lives ruined with a drinking conviction and its probably a law that results in overall net harm.

Because of our reliance on cars. If most people could walk or take public transportation home we could lower the drinking age.

Somehow I feel like we have it backwards then. We should have the minimum driving age be 21 for the same reasons, with the added danger to others of mistakes.

Belgium wants to give kids beer to keep them off sugary drinks: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12248/belgian-plan-give-...

They tested it out and the test was successful. The kids preferred beer to sugary drinks. The beer was much weaker than what adults are accustomed to at 1.5% to 2% alcohol.

Just some correction here for ppl who skim stuff:

The linked article says this was a trial in 2001. Only 1 school did it and it seemed to go well, but no other schools were willing to try it.

Depends on your definition of "innocent". Sugar is Satan-incarnate (and I am its slave )

I love my mucopolysaccharides, it keeps the COPD away.

Sorry for off-topic, but I must say this. Sugar is the worst substance for public health ever. It's literally poison. Modern society is mostly cured of diseases of the old, but it's littered with the chronic diseases (which medical science pretends to solve by sympomatic treatment) whose only cause is sugar. I abandoned sugar cold-turkey after watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM, and am thankful to God that I was only 18 when I watched it. And no, FDA says it won't do anything about sugar, see the video.

I wouldn't go that far.. introducing sugar in as many foods (and worse, drinks) as possible is a big problem. but sugar in of itself is a very useful quick energy boost. it's not like we waited for the 20th century to start liking fruits

it would be extremely difficult to run a marathon without sugar in some form

Fruits used to be a seasonal treat, and people lived very active exhausting lifestyles. As we've gotten more sedentary, sugar consumption has gone up, and it should truly be the opposite.

Also no, it's no more difficult to run a marathon with an all meat, zero carb diet than it is with a carb heavy diet. People run ultramarathons on carnivore diets:

https://youtu.be/PEgjafWFMQ4

And this is how ancient humans hunted game as well, despite not having access to trail mix and Power Bars, as you can see in the Masaai persistence hunting technique:

https://youtu.be/9iGJjdt1xSo

I can't really trust the nutritional advice of someone that deliberately loads up on things like bacon and red meat, which are known risk factors for colon cancer.

Everything's a "known risk factor" for some sort of cancer.

Not really, and the link between red meat and colon cancer is very well established and significant, much more than the alternatives.

Bacon is high on the list of pleasure inducing foods. Youi're going to have to share evidence to be convincing here.

The evidence is well known and any Google search will produce it. Here's a document from WHO: https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Monograp... Spoiler: bacon (as it's a processed red meat) is classified as carcinogenic (Group 1), red meat as probable carcinogenic (Group 2A). There are quite a lot of analysis showing there's up to a 50% increase in overall cancer risk due to eating red meat and up to 70% with processed meat https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...

TIL that pork is actually red meat! Interesting. I guess their ad campaign “the other white meat” worked on me. A google search does indeed confirm that pork is scientifically classified as red meat.

Neither of those links seem to include much evidence of causation (as opposed to the correlations they assert). Maybe the second one's evidence to that effect is behind the paywall? What measures did they take to rule out other causes? Are the mechanisms by which these substances allegedly cause cancer actually understood (as they are for e.g. tobacco)?

(Also: not all bacon is processed)

Here is more detail about the mechanisms by which they could cause cancer: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30376922/

And yes, all bacon, by definition, is processed meat according to WHO's definition. Bacon is salt-cured meat and the WHO considers processed meat as "meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes".

Sugar is correlated to obesity which is correlated to all types of cancer. Not sure I fully understand this argument, as many people promote many things that are risk factors for cancer.

Well, sugar needs an intermediate step to cause cancer, obesity, which is something that can be controlled. Not to mention that quite a lot of foods have sugar in them and you can't really take it out. On the other hand, red meat and bacon are known direct cancer risks, which you can't control, and you don't really need bacon and red meat at all, it's something that you can easily take out of your diet.

> Well, sugar needs an intermediate step to cause cancer, obesity, […]

I have never heard of this. Where did you get this? Did you know that the only way for cancer cells to create/use energy is by fermenting glucose? They can't use fats or ketones.

> On the other hand, red meat and bacon are known direct cancer risks, […]

Bacon aside, there is no proof which shows that red meat causes cancer. Yes, there are studies that show a correlation between red meat and cancer. However those studies did not differentiate between fresh unprocessed red meat and other processed meat like bacon, sausages, etc.

Edit addendum:

> […] you don't really need bacon and red meat at all, it's something that you can easily take out of your diet.

I'd argue the opposite, bacon aside. Red meat is a highly nutrient dense food. Sugar on the hand is just empty carbs, Metabolizing sugar will drain you body of important vitamins (e.g. B1).

> I have never heard of this. Where did you get this?

I meant that sugar causes cancer through obesity, not that there's an intermediate step between sugar and obesity.

> Bacon aside, there is no proof which shows that red meat causes cancer. Yes, there are studies that show a correlation between red meat and cancer. However those studies did not differentiate between fresh unprocessed red meat and other processed meat like bacon, sausages, etc.

Most studies do differentiate between unprocessed and processed red meat. And the correlation is fairly strong, not to mention the rest of health effects that a diet high in red meat is associated with.

> I'd argue the opposite, bacon aside. Red meat is a highly nutrient dense food. Sugar on the hand is just empty carbs, Metabolizing sugar will drain you body of important vitamins (e.g. B1).

Do you really think it's easier to take out sugar of your diet? I think the only way is to go full carnivore (not even milk or its derivatives). On the other hand, you don't even have to go vegetarian to remove red meat and bacon from your diet.

> I meant that sugar causes cancer through obesity, not that there's an intermediate step between sugar and obesity.

Yes, I understood that. However this is new information for me. Where did you get that?

> Most studies do differentiate between unprocessed and processed red meat. And the correlation is fairly strong, […]

Where are those studies? In vivo? In humans?

> […] not to mention the rest of health effects that a diet high in red meat is associated with.

You mean greater longevity, better mental health (less depression, less anxiety, …), better cognitive function?

> Do you really think it's easier to take out sugar of your diet?

Let's say processed sugar. And with "easy" I meant - that you won't suffer any negative health effects in the long term. If you stop eating something and in consequence suffer from malnutrition then that won't be "easy" to keep up in the long term.

> Yes, I understood that. However this is new information for me. Where did you get that?

There's not a lot of evidence that links sugar intake to cancer risk directly, when controlling for weight. Sugars aren't in the IARC list either. And the link between high sugar intake and obesity is clear too.

Obesity, though, is a well known cancer risk, and for quite a lot of cancers there's causal mechanisms proposed.

> Where are those studies? In vivo? In humans?

The IARC monograph has the details of the evidence collected to declare processed red meat as carcinogenic and unprocessed red meat as probable carcinogenic, and of course it includes studies in humans and studies that separated processed/unprocessed https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/m...

> You mean greater longevity, better mental health (less depression, less anxiety, …), better cognitive function?

I find it funny that you're asking repeatedly for sources for things that are repeated by every health agency in the world, and then just drop these claims with nothing to back them up.

> Let's say processed sugar.

But no one was saying "processed sugar". The diet I started criticizing was an all-meat diet, with the comment even criticizing fruit.

> If you stop eating something and in consequence suffer from malnutrition then that won't be "easy" to keep up in the long term.

You won't suffer from malnutrition by not eating red meat. In fact, most scientific diet recommendations include the limitation of red meats. You will, however, suffer from malnutrition if you withdraw from all foods that contain natural sugars, because that includes almost all fruits and vegetables.

If we talk about added sugar, diet recommendations usually include limiting its intake too. However, the point I was making in my original comment is that there's far more evidence linking red meat consumption to cancer risk than for sugar, and therefore I can't really trust the advice of someone who claims that an all-carnivore diet is better "because it has no sugar".

People do all sorts of silly things on bad diets, that doesn’t mean the bad diet is good or optimal.

Hunter gathers would and still do frequently gorge themselves on honey if they find a hive. They might not have access to a Mars bar but they definitely like sugar.

Jam and dried fruit aren't exactly a recent invention.

Funnily enough, I think it is exactly the other way round: it is much more difficult to run a marathon while depending on carbohydrate (because your stores are limited and the amount you can digest per hour is also limited). It is much easier to do long distances if you are accustomed to NOT depend on sugar. (If you are good enough, a running a marathon is not even a long distance event...)

So if you're "good enough" you can train your cells to use something other than glucose to produce ATP?

My memory on this is rusty but I recall fat being usable as fuel by the body after being converted to ketones.

This is not good for your liver long term: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7008768

Keto causes fatty liver disease

That is only for the brain. Muscles can use fat directly for energy. Glucose is a lot easier process and so the body will use that first. If plenty of sugar is always available your body won't develop the fat pathways as much.

A ketogenic diet can cause human metabolism to shift from glucose to ketones for power consumption.

Your cells already know how to produce ATP from fat. (except for brain cells, and maybe a few others) there are more steps involved than the glucose pathway, but the cells already know them. All you have to do is up regulate those pathways in the cells that already have them. This is why your body makes/stores fat in the first place: it is a nice way to store a lot of energy for later use that doesn't have the problems of excess glucose in the body, if the body couldn't turn it into ATP it wouldn't bother making fat.

Ask a real biologist for details. I know this was covered in my high school classes 30 years ago, but I haven't studied it since so I don't remember details or know anything later research has discovered.

That is a part of what long distance running and cycling training accomplishes: shifting your consumption to a higher mix of fats vs glycogen at the same intensity level. (To avoid the pedantic "buts" here, yes, your body is still consuming a lot of glycogen when you're running a marathon, but it's also using fats at a much higher % than it would in a 400m).

> it would be extremely difficult to run a marathon without sugar in some form

Some tribes hunt, running for several hours, without having breakfast. Their bodies are able to burn fat more efficiently and easily than us probably due to their lifestyle.

This kind of attitude is absurd and counterproductive. There's a long history of people demonising particular food groups and it gets in the way of developing actually healthy food attitudes. It used to be fat, now it's sugar.

Sugar is not "literally poison". What it literally is is the body's primary energy source and a requirement for survival. The fact that eating too much of it is bad for you doesn't make it poisonous. Everything has a median lethal dose (LD50), including water.

You can perfectly healthily enjoy a moderate amount of sugar as part of a varied diet just like you can healthily eat a moderate amount of any food as part of a varied diet. Extreme diet fads and the demonisation of entire food groups work against moderation and variety which are what we actually need in our eating habits.

None of this is to say there isn't a huge sugar problem in modern society, ofc. What I'm saying is the problem is excess, not the consumption of it at all, and demonising it as "poison" and attempting to eliminate it entirely is not the way to bring about moderation.

Is there ever a benefit to adding refined sugar to anything, though? We know there's a benefit to eating fruit and vegetables or arguably to eating dairy, and these foods contain sugar, but when would you want to add more of it? Or is it like alcohol in that it's mostly useful for enjoyment?

Long bouts of exercise like a marathon or the Tour de France or medical conditions like diabetes are the only exceptions I can think of where you'd want to instantly flood yourself with glucose.

> Is there ever a benefit to adding refined sugar to anything, though?

1) this claim is much weaker than "Sugar is the worst substance for public health ever. It's literally poison."

2) and it can be a good idea if otherwise someone would suffer from caloric deficit dangerous to health and eating more food is not viable (yes, this situation is unusual)

Sugar is the worst substance for public health ever. It's literally poison.

Its hyperbole meant to convey a sense of how bad sugar (particularly added sugars) is to the health of the population. Sugar is in everything (more hyperbole!) in the U.S. America by and large is addicted to sugar and it’s very bad for us. Everything is over sweetened. Can’t even buy bacon without sugar added in some form or other.

Hyperbole usually leads to a lot of unnecessary discussion where people tell you that it's an exaggeration and so on. A good old meta-discussion to eventually conclude that their stance on a topic was pretty similar after all.

Or you could move on, knowing perfectly well what they were saying...without being a putz.

Charitable interpretation by listener is indeed an important part of productive conversation. But charitable, I.e. Not intentionally or accidentally disingenuous statement by the speaker is also an important part. "You should know what I meant" rarely leads to good outcomes, not the least because typically any 4 people will have 5 Completely different but equally confident interpretations on what was so obviously meant :-)

Anyhoo. Yes sugar can be good and sugar can be bad. "It's literally poison and worst thing ever" does not productively move the needle of the conversation, almost regardless of interpretation.

Leaving aside the hyperbole and going back to the question from before, when is dietary sugar advantageous, and is adding extra refined sugar ever beneficial? To my understanding sugar is present in foods that are good for other reasons, but the sugar itself is only useful in niche situations when you need blood glucose fast, and there's almost never a health reason to add more.

This is in contrast to carbs in general, and to protein and fat, where some level of each is useful in the diet and provides a reduction in mortality and CVD risk.

> Leaving aside the hyperbole and going back to the question from before, when is dietary sugar advantageous, and is adding extra refined sugar ever beneficial?

As far as I know, it could be useful in case of huge need for calories.

Which basically never happens with modern lifestyle. But I guess may apply to firefighters working for several days or soldier lugging around piles of equipment.

But unlikely to apply to anyone reading HN. Unless they climb Mount Everest for fun, or volunteer as firefighters or are unlike enough to end in a war zone.

I know people who believe precisely that "sugar is a poison". The poster who wrote this could have been agreeing with them, or could have been using hyperbole. Who knows?

> Its hyperbole

If you need to rely on hyperbole/lies/propaganda then I am going to assume that you have no case.

Everyone speaks in hyperbole occasionally. One doesn’t need to rely on it but has its uses. It’s sometimes used to convey the strength of a belief. For instance, “I’m so mad at you I could kill you.”. It has other uses. That you appear to be unaware of how hyperbole is often times used and that it is a normal part of communication suggests that you are not really ready to participate in discussions.

Main benefit is that it sells more, whatever has the most sugar added might come out on top in a/b testing.

Yes, there's a benefit. Sugar is beneficial in moderation. On the subject, see biochemist Ray Peat's writing.

I won’t defend Robert Lustvigs position entirely. It’s rather extreme. But I think you need to watch his stuff before trying to criticise it. Glucose is the body’s primary energy source. Yes. But not fructose. (And sucrose, which is what’s commonly referred to as sugar, breaks down to fructose and glucose as you may know). His argument is that fructose is processed by the liver. Hence the idea that it is a kind of toxin (not a “poison” if I understand the terms correctly). Everything can kill you with a certain dose. But some substances are not safe - and will damage your body - with any dose. Alcohol is definitely one of those. Fructose? Maybe. I don’t know enough about biology to tell if Lustvig is wrong or not. I’m on the skeptical side still

Our close primate relatives seem to eat a lot of fruit. It’s a traditional part of the diet of any human society where it’s available. The idea that fructose is a toxin dangerous at any dosage doesn’t seem remotely plausible.

First, our primate relatives can easily eat a lot of meat and prefer meat if given. They do not have a lot of meat available in wild, but can occasionally eat it in the wild too. When they have meat available, they eat brains (fat) first: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chimpanze...

Second, they ferment fruit because fruit is always slightly poisonous (fructose).

Third, after being close to our primate relatives for some time, our ancestors spent a lot of time hunting, which is not a trait of monkeys we know. They eat more varied meat diet than any predator known, did that for a long time, much longer than (now) we eat crops.

Fourth, we have much higher normal percentage of fat in our body. For men, the normal fat percentage range is from 18% to 22%. Our primate relatives have much less normal fat, for most primates it is less than 9%. Our primate relatives sport bodybuilder's or high performance athlete's fat range just living their life.

As with alcohol, fructose is not a toxin in small doses, because liver can handle it (especially when it is fermented into lactic acid). But it is a toxin in doses we usually experience now. Look for "non-alcoholic fat liver syndrome".

In medicine they say the dose makes the poison.

But in general it's a far more complicated causality chain. When weight gain leads to insulin resistance then sugar is poison. We have lifestyles that maximize both a lack of physical labor and an excess of high sugar foods.

And evolution proves your point as the main difference between our "close relatives" is that our gut is better at digesting richer food (aka meat), which gives us a smaller and more efficient digestive system which freed resources for our big powerful brain.

Lustvig is a crackpot.

https://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-t...

His understanding of what happens to fructose in the liver is fundamentally incorrect.

> Hence the idea that it is a kind of toxin (not a “poison” if I understand the terms correctly)

The way I understand it, poison is an umbrella term that includes toxins, venoms, and chemicals. Its definition is basically "is harmful to living beings", while the other three are specific types/sources of harmful.

Edit: Ended up looking it up, looks like I got poison and toxin backwards. Toxin is the umbrella term.

> This kind of attitude is absurd and counterproductive.

If you go in a supermarket in EU almost every food product contains sugar.

Why does a peas can has to contain sugar ?

Because peas contain sugar.

Do you mean the naturally occurring sugars (shown in the macronutrient label) or added sugars in the ingredient list?

If it's in the ingredients list, it is added. There's also a macronutrients table in every packaged article.

There is exactly one common brand of mayo that has no added sugar. One.

And there's no way to buy sugar-free versions of many other kinds of food, from fried tomatoes sauce, sausages, etc. that were traditionally made without sugar for centuries.

It's a plague.

If you go in a supermarket in EU almost every food product contains sugar.

That just means that the item contains sugars. It doesn't mean that we've added sugars to it. A fresh apple has sugar. A fresh tomato has sugar. Many if not most fruits and vegetables do. It shouldn't be a surprise that the canned/frozen varieties have a bit of sugar on the label.

If the label contains sugar, it was added and not inclusive of other whole ingredients. You can buy canned apples (ingredients :apples) and canned apples (ingredients :water, sugar, apples). Guess which costs more.

Why would you buy canned apples without sugar or vinegar as conservatives in the first place?

The pure apple in a can can't last for long.

I hate to be the pedant, but I think you meant preservatives. I kept imagining Mitt Romney in a tub with sliced apples and it was unnerving to say the least

Sorry didn't mean to make your imagination run wild :/

In many European languages preservative is the word for condom.

The nutrition label will tell you if it contains sugar even though none was added.

If the ingredient list contains sugar, it was added.

peas are mainly starch which are long chains of sugar.

I dont know if you particular peas have added sugar.

Living things contain protein (arrays of amino acids and sugars), lipids (fats), and carbohydrates (sugars). Much of this converts to glucose by digestion or combustion (which is how they measure calorie content and such).

Glucose in blood is one of the sources of energy, not the sugar itself. Is it primary source of energy? I don't think so, because of successful application of ketogenic diets.

A person weighting 100kg should have less than 10 (ten) grams of sugar in a blood. This is less than 40 calories circulating in the blood of this 100kg person. The same person should have less than 10 (ten) grams of ketones in the blood and it is equivalent to less than 90 calories cirrculating.

Ketones are much more efficient energy source, they are twice as energy-dense. Glucose use needs a quarter of energy stored in the glucose, while fat (ketones) need only 3 (three) percents. Glucose needs insulin, fat (ketones) does not.

Glucose (which is not even table sugar!) is not a main source of energy in the body.

I also think that "variety" is a fad, just like other "extremes" you mentioned.

Sugar isn't poison. Blood-sugar spikes are poison. It's not a big deal to chug a bottle of Gatorade in the middle of a basketball game, your body uses that energy right away.

It is a big deal to chug a bottle of Gatorade while lounging in front of some screen when your body has nothing useful to do with all that sugar.

Simple carbohydrates such as pasta and potatoes break down quickly and can also cause one's blood-sugar to spike.

White pasta has one of the best insulin indexes of common foods. They're complex, not simple. Common misconception.

True. Over time, I noticed less undesirable weight fluctuation and even weight loss when eating pasta. Also, it felt like a light meal.

The trick is to not eat pasta with bread. Many people forget about the bread that they commonly combine with pasta and then blame the bloating and weight gain on the pasta that they had.

I'd imagine that cutting out red sauce, which commonly has added sucrose, would be better still.

Pasta is unique in that it seems to be beneficial, in terms of glycemic load, when eaten on its own. But combining it with other foods, but especially bread, may render it more taxing than other foods.

Which is a common trait of food combinations.

And wine to circle back to our topic at hand.

But simple pasta and fish dishes appear quite often in the "blue zones" around the globe. Something I should do a better job of eating more of.

Yes and: As you know, sucrose is composed of glucose (good) and fructose (bad). As I understand it, fruit has fiber which protects the body from fructose (blocks metabolism), and we still benefit from the glucose.

I still add sugar and honey and other sweets to my drink and food. Cuz I'm a fiend. But I do now try very hard to avoid straight fructose.

eating sugar is not a requirement for survival. You can eat zero carbs and survive just fine. Not so for fats/proteins.

As someone who has a couple of decades of zero sugar fasting, strict paleo, and ultra low calorie dieting under his belt, this isn't true. There's nothing just fine about what happens when muscle glycogen depletes after several days of true zero carb dieting.

Even strictly cutting out starch becomes problematic after some time, though my experience is also that humans will get unique health benefits from doing that for stretches. Which avoids the trouble of all-in zero carb.

The guy in the video doesn't advocate for zero carb, just to clarify. Traditional diets in native populations worldwide are all varied and very different, some don't eat carbs and yet they are healthy. Probably something to do with their lifestyle also.

People love their absolutes. Makes it easy to understand complex topics by breaking them down into "rules of thumb", and in the case of "sugar is poison" has double-reinforcement via a emotional element.

I wrote a good reply, then closed the tab on it. Just watch the video and decide for yourself. The culprit is fructose (a toxin almost as strong as ethanol, only consumable by the liver), the energy source it glucose and sugar is half parts each of them. The guy explains it down to very metabolismic reactions.

> whose only cause is sugar

Which chronic diseases are caused by sugar and nothing else?

The disease of brown rotten teeth ;)

I meant incidentally. As in, the general population gets those diseases almost only because of sugar, while they can get them by other means.

In my opinion the problems of sugar aren't that it's a carbohydrate (which are and should be the main energy source), it's in its metabolism: Sugar, especially without any fiber, jacks up the blood glucose levels, which are AFAIK pro inflammatory. Sugar added to a high fiber dish? Fine in my opinion.

Fiber is so incredibly important and often overlooked since it doesn’t have an effect like nutrition, cardiovascular, blood/sugar, etc. It’s so important to moving waste through the body healthily. It keeps it moving and you want waste to move consistently.

People who find themselves consulates, irregular, or have to strain when they go should consider more fiber.

> "It keeps it moving"

It doesn't, it can't. From paper "Stopping or reducing dietary fiber intake reduces constipation and its associated symptoms" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435786/ :

"Whilst it is often stated in physiology textbooks that bulking agents improve peristalsis, there is no proof of this in practice nor experimentally. Regardless of the food ingested, small intestinal and right mid colonic contents are fluid and all ingestible dietary fiber is suspended therein. Dietary fiber, therefore, cannot act as solid boluses for the initiation of peristalsis. In fact, dietary fiber had been shown to retard peristalsis and hold up gaseous expulsion in human experiments[22]."

> "People who find themselves consulates, irregular, or have to strain when they go should consider more fiber."

They should consider less fiber; from the same paper:

"Dietary fiber is also associated with increased bloatedness and abdominal discomfort[22]. Insoluble fiber was reported to worsen the clinical outcome of abdominal pain and constipation[18-20]. In our recent study, patients who followed a diet with no or less dietary fiber intake showed a significant improvement, not just in their constipation, but also in their bloatedness. Patients who completely stopped consuming dietary fiber no longer suffered from abdominal bloatedness and pain.[...]"

"Stools only become well-formed in the sigmoid colon and rectum and by this time, especially in constipated subjects, more stools result in more evacuation problems. It is not logical to increase both the volume and size of stool in patients with idiopathic constipation and indeed for anybody with difficulty in passing stools, e.g., due to anismus or anal spasm from anal stricture, fissure or pelvic outlet disorders. We have shown that decreasing the bulk and volume of feces immediately enables the easier evacuation of smaller and thinner stools through the anal sphincter mechanism. This eliminates the need to strain in passing stools, and prevents the tearing of the anal sphincter and bleeding due to large and bulky fecal loads. None of our patients experienced anal bleeding or straining following complete abstinence from dietary fiber."

"The results of this study should lead us to reexamine popular beliefs in benefits of dietary fiber and more studies should be undertaken to confirm or repudiate these results."

Super interesting. The GI is a mysterious thing in many ways. For example we aren’t particularly sure why diseases like diverticulitis occur in certain populations and not others. Genetics in part possibly but we see higher incidents of it when people from low incident populations move to high incident places suggesting environment is highly influential. And that fiber intake is much higher in the low incident places. But I’m sure there are other differences too. I’m no expert. Have just picked up things from doctor friends.

Carbohydrates are necessary to live at some (albeit much lower than typically consumed) quantity, so it's not precisely poison. Your point stands in that as a society we typically consume too much on average however.

carbohydrates are not required to be consumed in any quantity since your body can make them.

Other carbohydrates are not poison, the sugar (the fructose half) is.

You should differentiate between added sugar and naturally occurring sugar. It's OK to have fruit. It's not OK to have food loaded with artificial sweeteners or artificial sugars.

I run a small business that sells sports drinks and other healthy beverages aimed at athletes. Our drinks have a few grams of naturally occurring sugar, because some ingredients that are naturally hydrating also contain natural sugars. Nothing wrong with that, as opposed to a 16oz BigCorp (Gatorade, Powerade, Lucozade, Carabao, Body Armor, etc...) sports drink that has over 1oz of added artificial sugars. There's a MASSIVE difference. People don't realize that.

> Satan... I'm it's slave.

I finally understand this phrase! "I worship God and I'm His slave" just never seemed to ring any bells.

> "I worship God and I'm His slave" just never seemed to ring any bells.

Let me tune your system for you: Slave to Love.

I am not sure if science as we understand it had so much to do with it.

To my experience, society changed enough to no longer tolerate--or at least accept as normal- drunken family members. There was a point where the always-drunken-grandfather was suddenly considered ill and no longer just a little weird. A noticed this in my own family when I was still young. There was a point where constant-drunkenness was suddenly frowned upon with a certain vigor. And the younger generation sort of got the message: "I dont want to be like grandpa, he is actually a poor devil..."

To be clear, this wasn't just suddenly frowned upon. "Drunks" have been looked down on and/or overindulgence considered bad or sinful since -- I don't know -- the Greeks and Romans, certainly Christianity.

- Society is now expected to be your babysitter. If your actions have negative consequences, they should have been forbidden and prevented.

At what time in the past was this less true than now?

We're doing a lot less of "society as babysitter" now. The ability of people to be open about being gay, trans, non-religious, Jewish, mixed-race, and left-handed are all examples of society no longer caring about things it once pried into deeply.

As long as it only affects you, I think you should do whatever you want. But you are conflating "society" with "individual" here.

If a lot of people smoke, then a lot of them develop respiratory (and other) problems. So a lot more people need treatment, which could have gone to other patients. At that point it is no longer an individial situation which affects only you, it's a societal problem. Societies which don't address their problems eventually fade out.

It's not babysitting, it's self-defense.

> If a lot of people smoke, then a lot of them develop respiratory (and other) problems. So a lot more people need treatment, which could have gone to other patients. At that point it is no longer an individial situation which affects only you, it's a societal problem. Societies which don't address their problems eventually fade out.

By that same logic we should be locking down juice boxes, donuts, and bacon to prevent heart disease and diabetes.

At some point it’s definitely babysitting and we’re well beyond it.

Maybe we should. Its costing us over a trillion now and costs have gone up 10 times in the past 50 years.

Reverse your logic and remove all rules applied now; no seat belts for cars I mean take them out not just give the option to use or not. No regulation of alcohol use any age anywhere any time. No rules for smoking any age any time anywhere. And so on. Pretty soon it would be a mess for everyone.

> Reverse your logic and remove all rules applied now; no seat belts for cars I mean take them out not just give the option to use or not.

That’s a pretty dumb example. People clearly want safety features in cars. Seatbelts existed well before they were mandated.

They shouldn’t be mandated but people should wear them anyway.

> No regulation of alcohol use any age anywhere any time.

I’m fine with that too. If someone is drunk and belligerent there’s plenty of other reasons to arrest them.

But having a beer in the park is banned because you’re worried about a bunch of winos?

> No rules for smoking any age any time anywhere. And so on. Pretty soon it would be a mess for everyone.

Having restrictions for children is orthogonal. That’s us as a society deciding that children are not capable of making informed decisions.

We’re not with them 24/7 so we as a society set rules for what we allow them to do when we are not around.

On that topic, I think it’s fine for a parent to give alcohol to their child. That’s the parents decision. But that doesn’t mean I think we should have 10 year olds buying 40’s.

> we should be locking down juice boxes, donuts, and bacon to prevent heart disease and diabetes.

I agree. We should.

> At some point it’s definitely babysitting and we’re well beyond it.

Lol. There is a constant, well-funded psychological warfare to make everyone pick up as many of these harmful and addictive consumption habits as they can. As I'm writing this, and as you are reading this there are teams of people paid by corporate interest working hard to figure out how the best it is to make all of us addicted to sugary drinks in the name of profit. This is completely legal, and even a "respectable" profession. Pushing back against all these forces ever so slightly is now babysitting?

Very good point!

Juice boxes and donuts, absolutely. At least restrict it to adults only. Same as alcohol.

I for one look forward to the seeing how the first prosecution for fried chicken and grape soda possession goes.

Societal level engineering is about adding friction to things which are unhealthy. There's a lot of debate on whether we should do this, but for sure it has lots of examples of working.

QED: If you want to smoke yourself to death, you can. But the government wants to add some friction to that so it's not the default case for smokers. Taxes, awareness campaigns and (god forbid!) putting some limits on what cigarette companies can add to cigarettes.

Cost as well; water is dirt cheap (for now anyway, there's potable water shortages in plenty of places and that will become a worldwide issue soon enough), anything alcoholic has become more and more expensive for various reasons, including but not limited to taxes + extra "discouragement" taxes, at least where I live. Drinking is an expensive hobby, to the point where weed is cheaper and has less side effects if the purpose is to alter your state of mind a bit.

Lack of potable water will never become a worldwide issue. The lack of water which could become a worldwide issue is water for agriculture which causes starvation in poor countries which in turn causes refugee crises and wars. Lack of potable water will remain a very local issue even under very dire scenarios for global warming.

And lack of water would make alcohol even more expensive.

Very true. Making alcohol requires a lot of water.

A very efficient brewery will use 3 gallons water per 1 gallon of beer produced. An average one uses 6.

> If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.

It's worth remembering that alcohol sterilizes many otherwise dangerous things. Being drunk all the time can easily be better than being sick all the time.

It needs to be pretty strong to sterilize, way above strong red wine. Also the stronger it is the more it dehydrates you. So if you need to compensate sterile alcohol being drunk with unsafe water in some form, you still lose overall.

So no you can't satisfy your long term hydration needs by drinking anything strong enough to be safe by its alcohol content alone.

I cholera was the main problem and I think even a low % of alcohol would kill the bacteria

It wasn't just about the alcohol content, in the case of beer for example it was also about the brewing process involving sterilisation before that was widely being done to water, as well as the antiseptic properties of hops.

Look at it not from the angle of killing everything, but from the angle of how fast will trace amounts of life multiply in that environment. Absence of trace amounts wasn't really a thing before canning, which was at the stage of promising military prototypes during the Napoleonic Wars.

on our travel in SEA we always did bring with us some Hungarian palinka (50%+) and drank some after every meal. We have managed to avoid stomach issues.

Homebrewing wine made me suspicious of the claim that beer/wine were drank because the water supply isn't clean. The first thing you do is sterilise anything that will make contact with the liquid or it will spoil and be poisonous.

As a consumer one does not have to sterilize though, and that would be the advantage. That it tends to spoil very badly when not sterialized can be seen as a feature, it may act a detector for bacteria.

Maybe it helps that you sterilize a big batch once and then it stays safe indefinitely? I'd rather drink a 2 year old bottle of wine than a 2 year old bottle of lake water.

When your must or wort gets contaminated due to lack of sterilization it's unlikely to become poisonous. It's more likely to become vinegar. It's the fact that you're using uncontaminated fruit juice or boiled wort that makes the beer or wine safer to drink than water out of the cistern beside the outhouse.

It will not be poisonous. It will just taste sour.

You don't sterilize, you sanitize. There's a big difference.

I never understood the sterilizing theory, it coincides with the claims these times they also had mostly low alcohol types of beverages, such a beer and ale.

The sterilizing only really happens in modern wine level alcohol (14%).

You have to boil the water to make the beer.

I didn;t know to be honest. So good point, thanks for clarification.

However I dove into it, Boiling wasn't always easy, so they didn't always heat it properly for sterilization: https://byo.com/article/raw-ale/.

You have to boil the wort for hours otherwise it's not beer, it's porridge. It's that process that kills any pathogens, not the fermentation (obviously, since fermentation requires the presence of pathogens).

So boiling isn't strictly required, though it has nice benefits on the wort (in a phase called the "hot break"). However, it is necessary to reach certain temperature (140-160 F, though broader may work) to convert starch into sugar.

In old times, a metal vessel large enough to boil an entire batch of wort may not have been feasible. Other techniques were used in these cases.

Say you have a wooden barrel or tub:

* Take off a portion of the wort, boil it, and add it back. This is decoction.

* Heat rocks and add them into the wort.

> In old times, a metal vessel large enough to boil an entire batch of wort may not have been feasible.

Define 'old times'?

Eventually the most alcohol tolerant bacteria, the ones primarily fermenting the sugars, get killed by the alcohol itself (by denaturation, the alcohol makes the membranes soluble in water). At that point there are very few more alcohol tolerant bacterium.

Bacteria does not make alcohol. It is yeast, which is a fungus.

Ah true. I'm using the wrong family name.

Currently, alcohol consumption is quite unevenly spread: an 80/20 rule applies I think (and in my country, it's the higher educated who drink most). I wonder if this was true in the past, where beer might have been the only way to drink uncontaminated liquids.

Beer being a way of drinking uncontaminated water is a myth that somehow sticks around, similar to the belief that people in the middle ages thought the world is flat.

Fresh water outsiderof cities was abundant, and inside cities there was usually a system of wells, often running water wells at that.

AH yes, John Snow and the Broad Street pump. A well-known source of drinking water inside a city.

People in the today ages believe the world is flat. Given population difference and the Internet giving ignorant people wider reach, it's possible there are more flat Earth believers today than there were in the middle ages.

A big shift was also coffee. Works much better for focus work, and also gives a slight high (big in the beginning).

The coffee & alcohol cycle is also an interesting one in the West

High paced work environment & coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).

> coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).

I've heard that green tea can calm down the effects of caffeine (despite containing a bit of caffeine itself). Something to try if you don't want to give up coffee like me.

Try oolong.

Making a cup as we speak :)

Cheers!

Who downvotes oolong? Lol

The calming effect comes from L Theanine which you can buy separately and add to your coffee

Any tea does, just to varying degrees, and it definitely works. This is due to a chemical called L-theanine. I never have caffeine without theanine now. Usually I just drink a green tea alongside whatever other caffeine I have (or only drink tea). You can buy it separately but I don't see the point.

If you’re lazy like me, you can buy Loud Brew, which is cold brew coffee with L-Theanine.

    L-theanine

Yeah! I've personally experimented (n=1) quite thoroughly with it. It truly reduces or eliminates caffeine jitters.

This product is excellent for energy on the go. Caffeine and l-theanine in a single pill. I keep a few in my bag. I don't know if there's anything special about this particular product. There are other ones that may be better/cheaper. But I've gone through a few bottles of it in the past years and am pleased: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MQWJYJ3

    You can buy it separately but I don't see the point.

Well, clearly a lot of people like coffee and probably don't want to have a side of green tea with their coffee, so... you can see the point, right? =)

I do buy it separately. It's dirt cheap. I stir it into my coffee. Reduces caffeine jitter.

That all said, editorial time: caffeine is not awesome. It is a psychoactive substance (duh) and eventually it goes from "fun boost" to "I need this to feel normal." At least for me. I do have some every day but my goal is always to drink the smallest reasonable amount for me in order to manage my energy. Respect to people who drink 0mg.

Was your experimentation more casual or rigorous? People take supplements but rarely take the time to even casually log perceived effects or use a self-blinded A/B study (my own lazy ass included). If you took a more rigorous approach I'm curious about your methods.

Out of curiosity, how do you self-blind? Do you have a friend make your coffee for you, with/without the additive?

Well, you could make both types in identical cups, put labels on the bottom of the cups, shuffle the cups, drink one, record your observations and take the label from the cup you drank and stick it to your notes.

Assuming it's not detectable via taste I would find a way to pre-make and randomize test/control doses of the additive, and add the assigned vial for that day to my morning coffee.

Biggest issue I think would be making sure that there aren't any tells like flavor or some quality of the additive.

There's no taste or smell.

Brew identical looking bottles of cold brew. Label the bottoms 1 through whatever. Mix them up. Label the lids A through whatever. Probably need to add some creamer to mask any possible sediment. Drink from them throughout the week. Note the lid label and your reaction. At the end of the test period look at the bottoms of the bottles to correlate the controls and placebos with your experiences.

I personally don't feel the need with this particular thing though. It's a fairly pronounced difference.

It's also not really susceptible to the placebo effect IMO. Could I imagine some vague promised positive effect? Absolutely yes. Could I imagine the erasure of jitters? I don't think I could placebo that away.

Anyway as linked in another post this is well-studied.

Totally subjective, completely non-rigorous.

That said:

- I'm middle aged and have had tens of thousands of cups of coffee

- The difference is pronounced, not subtle

- It's well-studied https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18296328/

FWIW, I've played around with a lot of supplements. Generally the effects are non-existent or subtle. I'm not generally given to a placebo effect wrt this kind of stuff

Good to know. I may give it a shot myself.

Good luck! It's safe enough and cheap enough, for sure.

> Respect to people who drink 0mg.

But caffeine and even coffee specifically seem to have positive health effects. If people are happy with 0mg they should continue that, but if people are happy with low doses of caffeine they should also continue that.

Personally I love coffee, but I limit myself to one cup a day and drink yaupon when I want more caffeine. This results in less sweating, nausea, anxiety. Supposedly yaupon should help with stress relief as well, but I doubt it's a strong enough effect to overcome learning that a new ticket is due in 5 hours.

Is it the caffeine itself or tannins and other substances that have the health benefits?

Oolong is the tea variety with higher L-theanine. In Fugi, where that tea is from they rebrew their tea 4-5 times and they feel 3 & 4 are the best ones as they have more relative Theanine. I've been drinking Yerba Mate stacked w Oolong for 15 years now. Key to tea is careful brewing w attention to temp and duration. One last warning many modern tea bags are plastic, avoid those.

Interesting, I might try oolong! Might save me drinking multiple cups and running to pee so often.

I've heard this too, but green tea, for whatever reason, absolutely ratchets up anxiety for me. Black coffee can if I have too much, but is surprisingly less likely to

Same here. I got into loose leaf tea to cut down on coffee drinking. I tried all sorts of greens but had to stop drinking it because it made me some combination of anxious and easy to anger.

Yes! I also get irritable, just forgot until you mentioned it. I wonder if it's the theanine.

I experience the same effect and have heard others say the same thing. L-theanine activates excitatory neurons and also increases dopamine levels in the brain.

Green tea contains rather quite a lot of caffeine itself, depending on the kind. At the one end of the spectrum, a cup of Gyokuro is more or less equivalent to three expressos. At the other extremity green teas made of twigs rather than leaves have very little caffeine.

I've been overwhelmed by Gyokuro before...

Only if you measure cup (200 or so ml) of Gyukuro to an expresso (30 ml). Per 'weight' it has much less then coffee. (same measurements: 100 ml of expresso is about 210 mg of caffeine and 100ml of gyukuro is about 70mg of caffeine)

l-theanine, it's amazing - I'm drawing when I drink coffee, so I started an experiment and drew the same cat a few times, much much softer with L-Theanine in the coffee. But the coffee tastes like old feed with the L-Theanine in there xD

Yes it does, although not optimally. the L-Theanine is what offsets the caffeine, but it works best in a 2:1 concentration (L-Theanine:Caffeine). In Green tea, it's more like 1:6.

I have been maca and L-theanine jacking with the effect the focus lasts longer than with caffeine. My bias is that I have ADHD and now use a MAO inhibitor nootropics approach combined with Maca

Maca gets me so wired that I feel high. Even tiny amounts

Don’t know if there is much evidence, but I have heard that the switch from the main consumed beverage from alcohol based drinks to caffeine based drinks may have possibly contributed to the Enlightenment.

Europe went from a depressant to a stimulant, suddenly lots of science.

>I have heard that the switch from the main consumed beverage from alcohol based drinks to caffeine based drinks may have possibly contributed to the Enlightenment.

Why didn't the caffeinated beverages stimulate the advancement of science in the countries where those plants are native from?

It possible did. I think coffee was created in Arabia in the 900s. Weren’t the Arabic countries way ahead of Europe in terms of technology for those several hundred years?

Not in that way. Arabic expansion grew a new layer above cultural heritage of East Mediterranian region, and Persia, and its most important centers were exactly there, showing a lot of continuity with their "pre-coffee" roots. Which I think contradicts your theory.

Perhaps it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

Coffee really became common beverage in Islamic world about 3 centuries after the "golden age" finished

If that was the case, then the enlightenment would have occurred in north africa first, then the middle east and then eastern europe. Western europe was centuries late to coffee consumption. Also, how do you explain the renaissance?

The enlightenment happened for the same reason that the renaissance happened. Exploration and introduction to new lands, knowledge, goods, wealth, etc. The renaissance was the result of western europe's direct connection to east ( china, india, etc ) via the mongol empire in the 1200s. The enlightenment is the result of western europe's direct connection to the americas via columbus in the late 1400s. It's not an accident that most scholars use 1500 as the boundary between the renaissance and the enlightenment.

Isn't this exactly what happened? My understanding of history is that up until like the 16th century North Africa, the Middle East, and India were global leaders in science and industry.

> Isn't this exactly what happened?

No.

> My understanding of history is that up until like the 16th century North Africa, the Middle East, and India were global leaders in science and industry.

If anyone were 'global leaders' back then it was probably india and china but both were predominantly tea drinking societies. But there were no real global leaders of 'science and industry' back then because 'science and industry' didn't exist as we define it today and nobody had global influence. North africa hadn't been a leader of anything since the fall of ancient egypt. The middle east had it's moments of glory but far more moments of embarrassment ( european, mongol, turkish, etc conquest ).

Arguing coffee was behind the enlightenment is as silly as arguing tea is why britain conquered the world.

Okay, thanks for explaining!

> North africa hadn't been a leader of anything since the fall of ancient egypt.

Not true; see Carthage. They dominated trade and seafaring, and were even the first to sail around Africa (as opposed to the Portuguese, 2,000 years later). Ancient Egypt was in its heydey 2,000 years before Carthage.

Some podcast I was listening to made an interesting argument along these lines around tea, although more in the context of the industrial revolution. Their point was that tea, a stimulant, was absolutely central in motivating workers to get up at the crack of dawn and work long hours doing precise, grueling work. So much so that it became a strategic necessity for the English economy, leading to much of their colonial policy in China and India. Not sure exactly how "valid" this reading is, but it's definitely interesting to think about coffee and tea as actual stimulant drugs with economic consequences. Certainly today tea has a very benign reputation

Plentiful, low cost sugar also might have been a contributing factor, being a quick source of calories and energy, combined with the caffeine.

If your daily diet was previously primarily vegetables with some meat and in season fruits, and then suddenly you're having sugar with every meal, you would probably have more energy to work harder with the extra focus the caffeine provides.

You left out grains, which were the majority of Europe's diet for the majority of the written history of Europe. The sugar hypothesis doesn't make such sense in light of (cheaper, more plentiful, and calorie-dense) grains.

We really are what we eat.

Michael Pollan wrote about it:

https://michaelpollan.com/books/caffeine-how-coffee-and-tea-....

It's guaranteed to be false for the simple fact of human organism adaptability to caffeine. You certainly feel increased alertness after a cup of coffee, so subjectively it may feel very empowering. But if you're a long-time caffeine consumer your baseline (no caffeine alertness) goes down, and in the long run coffee just brings you up to the same level non-consumers have for free. So let's not fool ourselves, coffee is primaryly for pleasure, it doesn't make any miracles for productivity

> But if you're a long-time caffeine consumer your baseline (no caffeine alertness) goes down, and in the long run coffee just brings you up to the same level non-consumers have for free

Citation? It sounds a lot like that's something that you find convenient to believe, perhaps because you gave up coffee and you want to tell yourself you did something good for yourself.

Coffee is essential for my productivity, not for pleasure.

There was just a study published which proposed to show amphetamines of all kinds, actually decreased productivity, and significantly delayed time-to-resolution of cognitive problem solving tests...it also did show the people on the amphetamines vastly overestimate their productivity "boost" from the drugs. Obviously, devil's in the details.

Yes, please: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23108937/

>Coffee is essential for my productivity, not for pleasure.

For sure it is (for the reasons I described above). As for pleasure: I don't know, maybe you are the one who hates its smell, and taste, and just takes it as a medecine. It's not impossible, but it would make you an outlier.

Btw, I do consume caffeine, nicotine, and sometimes alcohol. I'm just conscious nothing of those gives me a superpower. Even though they can give a subjective feeling of superpower sometimes.

To me it seems like it's more about control: Before coffee you are tired and sleep well, then "flip a switch" (drink coffee) and you are alert and ready for the day. And you can do this even if perhaps you didn't sleep well, or not enough, or you just take a while to wake up, because otherwise you are not productive for a while.

Yes, the baseline is unchanged - but it's controlled and on demand.

At least in Spain they still serve wine & beer in university dining halls (included in the meals).

Yeah I've seen that in Spain as well, they have small cold beers at lunch and then get back to their day.

Here in north if we drink during lunch, we keep going.

Same in Portugal.

The larger ones here have bars on campus.

University students are adults though, so that's not that surprising? (Well, Americans are a bit of an outlier with their 21 drinking age)

Even in KFC, that was a nice finding for me, after a long walk through Toledo a few years ago.

"If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less."

Uh...if you have to work with the public, or incompetent people, you may be driven to drink more. The people who work in infosec seem to be the drunkest I know. They do mostly leave it for after work though, because it has gotten quite easy to do sobriety tests on people that are more than subjective.

> The people who work in infosec seem to be the drunkest I know.

Less so in tech-heavy Utah, I imagine.

> If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less.

If you don't have to work in an 1800s-England-style coal mine, sure. Modern mining is a high risk occupation with stringent controls on intoxicants.

And that is because we as a society have placed such a high value on the cost of a human life.

In Spain kids drank "quine" 70 years ago.

https://elpais.com/gastronomia/el-comidista/2015/11/11/artic...

In Spanish, but if you are a French speaker you might get some hints.

Ad from 1961:

https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2014/10/13/articulo/141317743...

70? Nope, it still happened in the seventies, been there, done that. My parents didn't like it, but my aunt had a bottle and sometimes gave me a shot. It was a very light drink, though, no high.

What people here would find unbelievable is how much we drank as teenagers. I remember drinking mixes (double shot of hard liquors, like gin, with soda) as soon as 14 and they would serve us openly in bars. Different times.

"Moving to a service based society. If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less."

Unless you are a software dev...

I'm a software dev and I don't drink at all.

I'm one of those persons that think this is a luxury job.

It's certainly not rare, but is drinking particularly prevalent in the software development industry relative to other industries?

It feels like it is. We even have jokes like the ballmer peak

I wouldn't say sugar is innocent. It still has the same damaging metabolic effects as alcohol, but without the inebriation.

Note that wine has become stronger, though. In France table wine used to be as little as 6% and drunk in smaller glasses than today as well.

> - Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com

Not buying it. Common sense has always been enough to see the downsides of alcohol. If people dont care about losing motor functioning and having a painful hangover right now they wont care about a chance they will have liver problems in 40 years.

I think a bigger thing is the transition from labor oriented work to intellectual work. Not hard to roof a house drunk. But its pretty hard to make spreadsheets drunk.

Raised by alcoholics during the Mad Men days so in reaction I never drank at all. My parents didn’t set a great example. I spent many an hour with a bag of library books outside bars while they boozed it up.

But I often think about the framers of the Constitution drinking vast quantities that fateful, blistering summer of 1787: http://johnjayhomestead.org/wp-content/uploads/In-the-Cups-o...

They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history.

Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior.

Less liquor and much of the beer was whats called small beer or table beer and had very low ABV between 0.5 and 2.0%. George Washington in particular was fond of brewing a bran and molasses based small beer.

Franklin warns against “dram drinking” in his excellent autobiography.

It was 4.5L per day though. Enough to stupefy any man or keep them drunk all day.

"For sailors the beer supplied was of the strong kind (10%-15% alcohol) since this was the only kind that preserved itself well in the sea, hence drunk as a sailor."

Though historical sailors in various navies were punished if they were visibly intoxicated while on duty (off-shift was fine, of course), so either they were incredibly functional alcoholics, they were great at pacing themselves, or that booze was heavily watered down.

4.5L of 0.5% ABV beer would not make you drunk. For comparison, this is equivalent to less than a pint of a typical mainstream beer. Indeed a 0.5% ABV drink can be branded alcohol free (at least in the UK).

Would 4.5L of 2% ABV make you drunk? Depends how quickly you can drink it. It's 9 units of alcohol. We commonly assume the body can process 1 unit/hour so if this quantity was consumed over an entire day, I don't think you'd get merry.

I'm not saying it's a good idea to drink like this, just highlighting the impact of ABV on the outcome.

It’s 8 pints of 13% ABV if you look at the table in the article. Manageable over the course of a day, but you’re definitely drinking.

Which table? The referenced table (9) only says "strong" (relative to what?) and gives a calorie count, which for beer is not very useful as an ABV estimate.

For sailors, in one estimate, and sailors are a special case as the article mentions, because strong beer is the only thing that doesn't go off at sea.

Everyone else is the much lower estimate discussed up thread.

> Manageable over the course of a day, but you’re definitely drinking.

Maybe I'm a lightweight, I would be absolutely trollied if I had to drink eight 13% pints over the course of a day. I have never been anywhere where they'd even sell you an entire pint of 13%, you are in 2/3rd or maybe even 1/3rd territory.

I have a favorite speciality beer that comes in around 13%. They used to sell it only in 22oz bottles and that was it for the night. If I decided to open one, I knew that was my one drink for the evening.

They recently started selling it in 12oz bottles, so it’s no longer a commitment but rather a choice.

Its basically a bottle of wine (lighter one but still). Careful there, the road to alcoholism is smooth and often you realize you're there only way after actually reaching the point.

> Indeed a 0.5% ABV drink can be branded alcohol free (at least in the UK).

Er, no! Perhaps in Ireland? In the UK the term "alcohol-free" can only be used if the drink has no more than 0.05% alcohol. However apparently it's allowed to use the term "alkoholfrei": take a look at the bottles of "Erdinger alkoholfrei" in UK supermarkets with tiny smallprint explaining that it's not alcohol-free (it's 0.5% and tastes quite good).

The rules may have changed fairly recently. They always used to sell "shandy" with 0.5% alcohol as a soft drink to children but I'm not sure if they still do that.

There's another rule that says you can't sell a drink that has the same brand name as an alcoholic drink to children, so children can't buy alcohol-free Heineken (which has 0.05% alcohol), for example.

(I think I read somewhere that they had to create a special exception for soy sauce in Australia because soy sauce can have up to 2% alcohol but obviously nobody's going to quaff it and if they did the 2% alcohol would probably not be their biggest problem.)

I have recently been trying alcohol free / low alcohol beers as the market is picking up for them, and people definitely advertise 0.5% as alcohol free.

From a quick tesco search Punk AF (https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/304722896) and Lucky Saint (https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/311448058) both contain the terms "alcohol free" prominently on the front but are 0.5%.

There are also a bunch of 0.0% beers, and their fine print is how you say, no more than 0.05%, but at least Brewdog and Lucky Saint are getting away with using the term for 0.5%, and I am sure I've seen more of that kind of thing.

You will find this level of alcohol (0.1% - 0.5%) in all kinds of foods and beverages. A study found orange juice that was 0.73% alcohol and hamburger buns that were 1.28%. [1]

The sources and numbers are getting mixed up here but on the topic of the Founders, the small beer George Washington was brewing was probably in the vicinity of 1%. I think it's pretty safe to say that a guy sipping 1% all day might get a bit of a buzz and not much more, especially considering the tolerance he'd build up.

As with anything the dose makes the poison. I've consumed a lot of alcohol over my life, but as I get older my friends and I have mostly lost our interest in experiencing anything beyond a mild buzz. At a bar we frequently order a lemonade/Sprite along with our beers and make DIY shandies [2] which brings the alcohol content down to like 2.5%. It's pretty hard to get drunk at that level even if you go at it for hours. Throw in a water here and there and it's even lower. I only wish society and the industry was more supportive of this manner of drinking, but the bars undoubtedly make less money off of us than the guy who goes full bore and ends up behind the wheel plastered...

[1] https://goodstuffdrinks.com/blogs/the-good-stuff/how-much-al...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandy

> > Indeed a 0.5% ABV drink can be branded alcohol free (at least in the UK).

> Er, no! Perhaps in Ireland? In the UK the term "alcohol-free" can only be used if the drink has no more than 0.05% alcohol.

The government says the threshold is 1.2%.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/low-alcohol-descr...

If you read your link carefully, it says:

"Low alcohol" -> 1.2% ABV (the threshold at which beer duty has to be paid)

"De-alcoholised" -> 0.5% ABV

"Alcohol free" -> 0.05% ABV

"Non-alcoholic" -> "should not be used in conjunction with a name commonly associated with an alcoholic drink" except communion wine.

Oh, yes. I have no idea how I was reading "alcohol free" as "low alcohol" in the comments to which I responded. My bad!

No, GP is correct.

Advertising Standards Authority:

> The alcohol section of the Codes applies to ‘alcoholic drinks’, which are those above 0.5% ABV. Drinks at or below 0.5% are, for the purposes of the Codes, considered to be non-alcoholic.

https://www.asa.org.uk/news/advertising-zero-alcohol-product...

You're right about this though:

> There's another rule that says you can't sell a drink that has the same brand name as an alcoholic drink to children, so children can't buy alcohol-free Heineken (which has 0.05% alcohol), for example.

and it's 'worse' - you can't buy 'no-secco' or 'apple fizz' or whatever they're marketed as, even though they're absolutely nil alcohol, not removed, it was never there. But obviously other cordials and carbonated soft drinks like San Pelligrino, Shloer etc. are fine, just because they're not made to look like a sparkling wine bottle.

See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/low-alcohol-descr... (as mentioned by darrenf elsewhere in this thread):

"Alcohol free – this should only be applied to a drink from which the alcohol has been extracted if it contains no more than 0.05% abv"

But: "the decision was made to replace the legislation with guidance setting out the four existing descriptors that industry will be expected to follow"

So (1) it's not clear that Brewdog and Lucky Saint (mentioned by SCdF elsewhere in this thread) are breaking an actual law by failing to follow the guidance which Erdinger apparently does claim to follow, and (2) perhaps that rule really does apply only to "a drink from which the alcohol has been extracted", so perhaps it wouldn't apply to a shandy made by diluting alcoholic beer?

Actually I think you're right. The bit I quoted is for the purposes of applying: https://www.asa.org.uk/type/non_broadcast/code_section/18.ht...

which is basically just rules about how you can market (it's fun and cool to drink alcohol kids!) 'alcoholic drinks', i.e. anything under 0.5% can be marketed in ways that says you can't for alcoholic drinks.

But a slightly different page than the one I quoted above goes on to say the same as yours:

> In terms of the official guidance, the descriptor ‘alcohol free’ should only be used on drinks from which the alcohol has been extracted if it contains no more than 0.05% ABV. Where a product has had the alcohol extracted but it remains above 0.05% ABV but at or below 0.5% ABV, the descriptor would be ‘de-alcoholised’.

https://www.asa.org.uk/news/low-and-no-alcohol-drinks.html

So yes, either it tells you something about how they're making it, or they're wrong to be using that 'descriptor'. (Surely the former? Brewdog make 'Punk AF', they'd have to rebrand it completely if they're not allowed to call it 'AF', surely they'd have been on top of that?)

Oh wait though - the page I originally quoted goes on:

> CAP is aware that official government guidance exists on how alcohol content at or below 0.5% should be described, but understands that this guidance is not legally binding. Therefore, the Codes do not require compliance with this guidance.

which explains why I couldn't find anything enacted on legislation.gov.uk. So it is just a matter for them as the regulator, but these two pages on their own site seem to be in contradiction about whether they care about use of the 'descriptor' or not?

> Perhaps in Ireland?

Why make this call out?

The Brit needs to engage in his Paddy bashing.

0.5% is an EU regulation than Ireland specific. And apparently the same level in the US from my (just done now) googling.

Would you like some fish to go with that chip on your shoulder?

How is that an appropriate reply?

Only because it's a different country using English!

Before Austria joined the EU (in 1995) there used to be significant differences in the rules on food labelling between Austria and Germany, to the extent that sometimes a product would have two separate lists of ingredients, one for Austria and one for Germany. The same may now happen with Ireland and the UK, and perhaps the term "alcohol-free" is already being used differently. See https://www.ibec.ie/drinksireland/-/media/documents/drinks-i...

What’s Ireland got to do with the UK’s alcohol laws? If it’s a racist trope you’re trying to make, you might be happy to know that Ireland consumes virtually the same quantity of alcohol per capita as the UK.

I mentioned Ireland because Ireland is in the EU and uses English officially so I wouldn't be at all surprised if the use of "alcohol-free" in Ireland corresponds to the use of "alkoholfrei" in Germany rather than to the use of "alcohol-free" in the UK, those two apparently being different. It honestly hadn't occurred to me that someone might suspect a racist trope!

It’s an EU wide definition that exists in 27 countries not specific to Ireland. Your comment was unfortunately worded if thats the case as at least two other people picked up on the same remark. Apologies if so.

There is no way 2% makes you drunk in practice. When I was 14 drinking 3.5% worked like one or two times before I got used to it. And I drank it really fast.

What you didn't get used to was drinking enough of it. 3.5% will get you drunk in big enough quantity.

Really? Have you tried it? I don't think it is possible for an adult. When I was in China vising a friend we tried to get abit drunk on local beer that was like 3.6% at most and it was like drinking soda. The locals seemed to drink spirits together with low alcoholic beer for some reason so there was no strong beer in stores, except some place that had Heiniken.

I have this pet theory that alcohol is not linear. Like, 5% beer get you way more drunk than the same amount of alcohol in 4.4% beer.

It's the percentage of alcohol in your system (Blood Alcohol Content) that makes you drunk, not the raw amount.

If you're drinking 30-50 units of water for every unit of alcohol, all that alcohol is going to be very diluted and have little effect on your BAC. There's probably a threshold beyond which you'll just piss it all out before the your BAC ever reaches a meaningful number.

That honestly doesn't sound right. Drinking more water won't dilute your blood / BAC. You're mostly limited how fast you can drink that much liquid.

You are limited by how much liquid your digestive system can absorb in any given hour. I've heard that it's somewhere around 1 liter per hour. Any excess liquid is going to slosh around in your intestines instead of entering your bloodstream.

Meanwhile, your liver can remove about 10g/12ml of alcohol per hour. In order for you to reach a meaningful BAC, you will need to absorb significantly more than that.

For example, drinking 1 liter of 1% alcohol solution per hour will not result in any significant BAC, because you can remove alcohol from your bloodstream faster than alcohol enters your bloodstream. You've got a well-optimized queue there.

5 liters of 1% alcohol is the same as above, just repeated 5 times. Your queue is still working fine.

1 liter of 5% alcohol, on the other hand, will dump 50ml of alcohol into your bloodstream within an hour. Now you have a backlog, and this backlog is what increases your BAC.

So dilution does matter, even if the absolute amount of alcohol is the same. You're basically diluting alcohol consumption over time.

I regularly drink 4% beer, and it's not difficult to get quite a bit tipsy on it, you just need to drink more. I regularly see men in pubs who drink 5 liters of such beer in an evening and that does get them drunk.

Sure I agree, but it feels like it is more than 5/4 times more for the same drunkness from 4 and 5% beer.

Who drinks 4.5L of anything a day? That’s 18 x 250ml glasses.

If you’re doing hard physical labour all day on a hot day, maybe you need about that much? It does match advice I have seen for desert hiking.

It's much easier to drink beer than water. When you are working physically in hot weather, it's pretty easy to drink 5L and perspirate most of that.

One time I bicycled something over 40 miles in the hills outside Las Vegas on a 105-degree day. I:

    1. Drank a gallon of liquid (could have been water or sports drink, I don't remember) on that ~3 hour ride.
    2. Didn't pee until I got home -- and not much then.
    3. Came home with dry clothes, despite (obviously) sweating something like a gallon of liquid. There was no evidence of sweat, ever -- it all evaporated.

One time I was helping build a house in summer. I drank 5L of watery low-sugar tea apart from about 1,5L other liquids and peed maybe three times that day. I had dry clothes but very visible traces of salt on them. Other time I drank 7L of beer in a night, but peed like every 20min.

When I was a kid my mom stocked Minute Maid frozen orange juice and powdered vitamin c. When I was sick I would stay home (maybe 11 or 12, different times) and watch TV and drink orange juice. I would fall into a pattern of drinking a 10-12 oz glass of juice during a show segment (maybe 7 minutes) and during the commercial break I’d go pee and refill my juice. On the half hour break i’d make another pitcher. So that works out to something like 3 quarts of heavily-vitamin-c-dosed orange juice per hour for at least several hours out of the day. I have no idea how my kidneys kept up with that.

Ok, but that’s an extreme example and you only consumed 3.8L. 4.5L is a LOT. Even the 8 glasses a day of water suggestion is considered on the high side and that’s only 1.9L.

> Even the 8 glasses a day of water suggestion is considered on the high side and that’s only 1.9L.

The recommended amount depends on who does the recommendation but 1.9L doesn't seem high.

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/fr/efsajournal/pub/1459

"Adequate Intakes (AI) have been defined derived from a combination of observed intakes in population groups with desirable osmolarity values of urine and desirable water volumes per energy unit consumed. The reference values for total water intake include water from drinking water, beverages of all kind, and from food moisture and only apply to conditions of moderate environmental temperature and moderate physical activity levels (PAL 1.6). [...] Available data for adults permit the definition of AIs as 2.0 L/day (P 95 3.1 L) for females and 2.5 L/day (P95 4.0 L) for males."

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/43403

"The minimum water requirement for fluid replacement for a 70kg human in a temperate zone equates to 3L per day, or 42.9mL/kg [according to the Tropical Agriculture Association]. Minimum requirements for an individual the same size but in a tropical zone equates to 4.1 to 6L/day"

"Age and gender specific Adequate Intakes (AI) for water were established in 2004 by the [United States] Food and Nutrition Board (5). The Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) for water are [for ages 19 and older] Men 3.7 L/day Women 2.7 L/day"

Reminds me of days of cycling across North Vietnam during the summer : 40c, tropical levels of humidity, very steep hills. I was young, stupid and stubborn.

One stop every 2 hours to chuck 500ml of beer (Bia Hanoi, pretty nice light blond), so about 4 stops a day. It worked fine ! Pee was ok color, enough tipsy to keep my sense but numb the pain of cycling. My clothes had aureola of salt and urea.

I usually do. I have a 2 liter water bottle that I fill up at least twice a day. Though ironically with the heat this summer, I've been exercising and drinking less.

Anyone trying to keep parts of their immune system down.

Obviously they need something to wash down their 40 potatoes a day.

I also find the amount questionable, as I suspect that our modern expectations of what that means and the details of what they meant when they recorded personal consumption means there's something lost in translation here.

Even when I was outside scouting crops 10-12 hours a day on foot in southwest kansas with peak 110F temps, I'd still not need to drink more than 4 liters of water a day. I could push it up another liter, but it wasn't needed and could actually be harmful if one overhydrates. And that's the extreme of the year, way more what I'd reach for most of the year.

Whereas the daily motto of the fuckers was apparently "I am a machine that turns beer into piss"

It's pretty easy to drink four gallons (+extras) on a hot day roofing.

The article also mentioned the beer ration could be passed to families.

Which had me thinking of various pecuniary benefits armies pass and why. Salt -> salary is well documented, on the opposite side slightly less so but still somewhat known was for conquering armies to compensate farmers for essentially pillage as the monetary compensation can't buy much grain nor meat when the army's eaten the village's as well as that of surrounding villages. It also wasn't unusual for state coffers to run dry also, delaying soldiers' salaries, plus graft - several banks still around were founded on the basis of lending to a liquidity starved crown, a modern placation and guarantee of support in the classical baronesque sense perhaps.

And I became curious about all the other money-like tokens, like these beer rations, backed by the promise of a commodity, that floated around in those time, and in ours today. Meandering thoughts, the best kind.

> Salt -> salary is well documented

Is it? At least for Roman soldiers there is no evidence at all that was the case. It just seems to be a myth originating in 18-19th centuries (like a lot of things in popular history).

Doesn't make sense either, as you can't do much with salt except use it on food as seasoning or as a preservative, which are both useless as salary since you still need to pay for your actual food and other expenses.

It would only make sense if it was given to be used a store of value, but they had perfectly good coins to pay salaries with.

> It would only make sense if it was given to be used a store of value, but they had perfectly good coins to pay salaries with.

The Roman Empire towards its end in the west had suffered from a lot of inflation, so coinage was either too expensive for everyday use (i.e. gold-coins, each of which would be a year's salary for a soldier), or worthless (basically just lumps of base-metal).

I think at a certain point taxes were required to be paid in goods rather than coin which really does show that your currency is worthless (when even the state refuses to accept it!)

It's well documented that the word salarius is derived from salt, it's just very unclear why.

Paying out salaries in cash (well, coins) so soldiers can buy trade goods like salt certainly makes more sense than handing them sacks of NaCl.

> It's well documented that the word salarius is derived from salt, it's just very unclear why.

It’s not unlikely that the connection between these were was already merely etymological by that time and made barely any more sense to the Romans as it does to us.

Here's a detailed analysis with reference to primary sources:

https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.h...

tl;dr: There is a genuine linguistic connection between "salt" and "salary", but there is no evidence soldiers were ever paid in salt, or given an allowance specifically for buying salt. Possibly "salary" meant "money for salt" with "salt" used metonymically to mean any trade goods, similar to how "fish" was used in Ancient Greek, but even this is pure speculation.

Your [citation please] got me looking. https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/7159/etymology-of-... ; Google Scholar seemed to provide some references in a search for 'salt salary etymology'.

It is somewhat documented, well documented perhaps.

Correctly documented?

I never finished the recent popular book 'Salt'. After a few chapters it became tedious, repetitive, plus the book consistently omitted tying text to sources. A frustrating read.

As I didn't in fact tie Salt to Roman soldiers' salaries, that was your reading, simply salt -> salary, I'm curious what references you could provide for different etymology? I'm genuinely interested, I rarely reply to replies.

I mean the words might be related but I don’t think there is any evidence that soldiers were actually paid in salt?

Seem like a reasonable analysis:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jfkkmk/when_...

Fascinating, thanks. Not just for the salt, but the trail and narration. Saved, and saved the old.permalink... to the Wayback Machine just in case.

Salt, and salt-derived commodities (salt-cured fish, vegetables, meat) were major sources of income for societies and governments for quite a long time, so the etymology correlation probably has some legs.

Like a lot of historical things, there's a certain amount of guesswork involved, but it hangs together pretty well. It's unlikely that we'll find the Noah Webster of 100 BC who puts it down on a clay tablet.

I don't think the yeasts they had at the time could get anywhere near 10%, so is he saying the beer was fortified with spirits? I know that Churchill said "The traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash" so perhaps it was.

How could they make wine if they couldn't get close to 10% ?

Wine uses completely different yeasts, and probably wasn't as strong either as it is today.

Relatedly I learned the other day how Washington kept some men in captivity who he forcibly took teeth from to cobble together from different men’s oral wounds his famous dentures. Interesting

If you share such a weird story, maybe also provide a link so others can judge whether there is some substance?

I won't be expected to exhaustively cite well-known history you can google in an instant, sorry. You find it weird to learn that Washington had slaves and used their teeth? Don't know what to say - it's what he was. I'm sorry if you got a Florida education :P

There seems to be dispute about it:

"As such, it remains unknown whether Washington personally used any teeth purchased from slaves or others"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_teeth

So the usual expectation is indeed, if you share uncommon facts, you share the link to those facts, so others can judge more easily, if your facts are facts at all.

There’s no dispute of him having healthy teeth extracted from slaves and having slaves, only on the detail of whether the dentures made from them were used in his own mouth or for someone else. It is also fact that his dentures included human teeth, but maybe not the specific 9 teeth we know he had taken from slaves

> Records at Mount Vernon show that Washington bought teeth from slaves

is what I said, had slaves and took their teeth, except that maybe he didn’t put the extracted teeth into his own mouth and used the slave teeth for some other purpose or a different person’s dentures, you’re correct on that and I thank you for sharing that detail.

This was my understanding too, but the article in the first footnote uses some much larger values for alcohol content. It generally seems well sourced but these numbers are all over the place as if the author first got the numbers and then randomly placed the decimal point and termed some of them 'percentages'.

This is the first article that has implied that this historical beer consumption was this high % wise, so I am suspicious of the phrasing "taken to be" that is used all over the place. IDK if this means something specific in the context of scientific papers, but in conversational English it can be interpreted as "a number I made up".

Almost sounds like kvas.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass

> very low ABV between 0.5 and 2.0%

How did they brew such small beers? Nowadays the non-alcoholic beers (basically 0.5%) are mostly made by removing alcohol after brewing, which greatly affects the taste. I think it's a highly desirable skill to be able to brew good small beers. (Or maybe those beers were just not very good by today's standards.)

Wouldn't you just interrupt the fermentation process before it gets that high? Or add less nutrients for fermentation?

Yes. Also, the yeast strains are much less pure and will probably die sooner.

I'm not sure you get a full enough taste though. I've made low-alcohol beers with fewer grains and lots of hops and it was unbalanced, the base was not there.

I think this is the key point. We want something that tastes like a 21st century beer but otherwise with the properties of an 18th century beer.

That reminds me of Belgian beers which have double the alcohol of your regular beer but tastes like there is barely any alcohol.

Actually, my impression is that the main driver of that "alcohol free beer taste" is the absence of the taste of alcohol. I kind of want to test this hypthesis by adding pure alcohol to an alcohol free beer, but pure alcohol is not really something you find in the supermarket. Germany has a non-alcoholic drink called "Malzbier" (malt beer), which is basically the liquid you would ferment to make beer. It is _insanely_ sweet. So I would expect that a lightly fermented beer would be much closer to a sweet drink than to what we expect under the name "beer".

I have an experiment for you, pour e.g. a 0.5L Erdinger Weißen upside down and observe the resulting mess, then do the same with the 0.5% version of the same beer.

There's much less foam in low alcohol beers, so it's not just the alcohol content (unless that affect it directly in some way I don't know about).

As far as I understand a Hefeweizen is put into the bottle with live yeast, which continue the fermentation and create the characteristic thick foam. So indeed, in that case, you cannot have that effect without alcoholic fermentation.

But I am more of a Pilsener guy, and there are a few good alcohol free Pils which I am convinced would taste like the "real deal" with the added taste of alcohol.

All beer, historically, was bottled with live yeast. That's how you got the carbonation. Some times we cheat today.

Alcohol does change the surface tension so foaming will be different. Ever seen a security guard shake someone's water bottle to check if it's really water?

The thing that makes beer foam stay there is the protein content. Yeast contributes some, but it's also in the grain. The foam should be less different if you compared something filtered like Heineken and Heineken 0.0.

I can buy grain alcohol that’s 95% pure alcohol at my local liquor store. It might be kept behind the counter where I have to ask for it, but it is available.

Grain alcohol is illegal in many states. California restricts alcohol to 60%, for example, so you won't be able to find it in any corporate place, though you can occasionally luck out and find a bottle in a small liquor store that doesn't mind selling pseudo-legal things.

> So I would expect that a lightly fermented beer would be much closer to a sweet drink than to what we expect under the name "beer"

this is not a good expectation. Yeast will consume all available sugar till the alcohol %age gets too high for them (depends on the yeast but even the hardiest cultured strains poop out at around 16%. But they can only consume what sugar is in there, so if you ferment starting with something with little sugar, it will not arrive at a high alcohol level.

Our ancestors did not have access to lots of sugar, even their fruits (therefore juices) were less sweet.

to your point about insanely sweet starter, wine grapes are also insanely sweet, so sweet we don't want to eat them. Table grapes like you buy at the grocery, sweet as they are, are much less sweet than wine grapes. So, starting from the ultra sweet grapejuice, average wine gets to 12% alcohol.

> Actually, my impression is that the main driver of that "alcohol free beer taste" is the absence of the taste of alcohol.

I think it depends on the style. For hoppy ales Athletic Brewing in the US makes really good beers, you can hardly tell there is no alcohol. As far as I heard they don't really remove alcohol, but I don't know how they brew it. (Might be a secret process.)

Regarding German beers, this is also what I find near me now, and they are all decent, but you can definitely tell they don't have alcohol.

Athletic brewing is easily the best non-alcoholic beer I've had. They have less than .5% alcohol which makes me wonder if that little bit helps keeps the flavor profile correct.

I semi-regularly brew kvass, a [delicious] low alcohol content carbonated probiotic drink, and it's quite similar to beer:

- Toast 300g sliced [rye] bread to near burning

- Boil 3 liters of water, turn off, insert/soak bread

- Let sit covered for 6 hours

- Add 150g sugar, 6g instant yeast

- Let sit covered for 18 hours

- Remove bread, strain out extra liquid from it. Birds love it, once it dries out.

- Bottle up the liquid (leave headspace for gassing), and occasionally burp it.

- Wait. Longer bottling period = smoother, less carbonated, more alcohol, less sweet. ~12 hours, but this is very subjective.

- Chill + drink. Take the lid off very carefully, aim away from eyes.

What makes it probiotic? I don't see any addition of bacteria, other than yeast. I thought regular "probiotics" usually contain multiple strains of bacteria?

I suspect it’s the latter. The beers were nothing like the highly polished industrial lagers or ales of today.

In Finland, a home-made small beer (kotikalja) remains a popular drink in the countryside. The alcohol content is around 1%. It’s a sweet brown mush that you can make in one day at home using rye malt sold in every grocery store. Here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtgWBCnOt4M

Kotikalja is the Finnish version of kvas, which is ubiquitous across Eastern Europe.

There's a Tibetan/Bhutanese/north Indian barley version of this too, known as chhang.

Chhang generally reaches around 4-6%, but it is also a generic word for that fermented barley drink, so maybe other regions brew it at a lower ABV.

You can brew a 5% beer, then mix it 10:1 with water, and you'll get 0.5%.

It's not up to modern standards for "alcohol free" beecs, but it works if you're just aiming to hydrate while avoiding pathogens in your water supply.

But you just added 10x water from the questionable supply to your beverage.

Yes, but the alcohol kills the bacteria in the water

Is that true at 0.5%?

No, typically what made beer safe to drink was the boiling, not the alcohol.

I've just finished Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind, where the protagonist is a street vendor of the traditional Turkish beverage boza. Boza is a mildly alcoholic fermented barley drink considered ok for Muslims to drink. The gradual disappearance of boza sellers in the street is an index of the changes in Istanbul and Turkish society in the late 20th century, really enjoyable book. From what I've read I can imagine it's an acquired taste.

My sibling from another set of alcoholic parent(s)! I too never drank, because of my father's negative example. I tell people "My dad drank enough for the both of us."

Reminded of a slightly less dignified politician: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/09/thatcher.williamh... "Hague: I drank 14 pints of beer a day" - brand not specified, but if we take as "standard pre-CAMRA british beer of the time" Watneys Red Barrel at 3.8% that should give you an idea. He is also accused of exaggerating wildly; to me one pint an hour while doing manual work seems plausible-to-high for someone who's built up a tolerance.

Americans should probably date "stopping being drunk all the time" to Prohibition; the overwhelming national support for it, especially from newly enfranchised women(+), gives an idea as to how big a problem it was.

(+) As a non-American, I had to check this, and Prohibition very slightly pre-dates universal votes for women although both were in 1920 and it may be possible that the franchise differed by state? It's certainly true that women temperance campaigners were very important, given the role of alcohol in domestic violence and budgeting.

Universal prohibition (18th amendment) predates universal suffrage (19th amendment) by a few years, but the two movements had a lot of overlap, and women did widely support the idea and were used to motivate the concept. That said the two are not everywhere the same: the South was had more support for prohibition than suffrage and the west was much more for the right to vote than banning whisky. But also prohibition in the US goes back much farther. Toqueville mentions the idea favorably, many religious movements advocated some form of it (Mormons, shakers, Mennonites,…), and most eastern states still retain a variety of blue laws that restrict alcohol sales and several colleges still retain local prohibitions from 150 years ago.

My grandfather had a worker who’s was drunk all the time. my grandfather would pick him and drop him off and always paid his wife. This would end sometime in the 50’s.

3.8% is fairly low alcohol content. Someone with any tolerance could sip those most of the day and not ever appear drunk.

It's good to note that tolerance to alcohol is bad. It means your body has been damaged and is no longer responding to alcohol as it once did, to protect your organs.

edit: I should also note tolerance to alcohol is a warning that much greater problems are imminent. It is a red flag.

I take it is a red flag concerning addiction and its consequences, but did you have other specific "greater problems " in mind? Just out of curiosity...

Greater problems is not what I have in mind it's biology. Such things as fatty liver and then cirrhosis. Alcohol tolerance is just the tip of that iceberg. The phrase "alcohol tolerance" belies its powerful meaning.

There's an interesting episode of "In Our Time" about the "temperance" movement in the late 1800s, primarily in the UK but also a little in the US. It was a much milder version of the sentiments that eventually (in the US) led to Prohibition. In Our Time makes it sound more like an early self-help movement.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013zl8

ps. there's also some fascinating speculation at the end about connections between the temperance movement and early movements for women's rights and how that played out very differently on each side of the Atlantic.

You might be giving everyone else credit for the work of a sober few.

Not forgetting James Boswell:

"Take his entry for the night of 16 October 1783. Boswell records that he and six friends consumed 11 bottles of claret, two of other wines, two of Madeira, three of port, and one of rum. The next night, they polished off 11 bottles of claret, three of other wines, three of port and three of rum."

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2004/dec/19/unitedkingdom...

> Boswell died, aged 47, ravaged by syphilis and cirrhosis

Perhaps they were some of the most functional humans despite their alcohol consumption.

Given the importance of the "gnôle" (a french word for a often home or clandestinaly made strong spirit in France) in rural parts of France to this day [1][2], I am pretty sure the author is underestimating the importance of spirits in history.

[1] usually mixed with coffee several times during the day, and very often a shot glass in the evening

[2] I've never seen a sober postman when I visited my grand parents as a kid in the 80's and 90's. Back in the days they weren't timed and would be invited for a coffee at every single farm they visited to talk about the news of the day. He really served as a local and vocal newspaper for all of them. The coffee itself wasn't strong in cafeine, but was almost always served with "la goutte", a small but significant amount of spirit.

It also depends of the region you live in. In Brittany for example people drunk a lot of watery wine and sweet cider but they drunk it in quantity for some of them. You canread in Jean-Marie Deguinet's "Mémoires d'un paysan bas breton" (19th centuary) that people were drinking a lot of cider and particulary his wife who was a cider Alcoholic.

The gnole as you speak is more something that became popular amongst the Poilu during the first world war and after, I'm not sure if there was loads of people drinking it in the past but it feels like the spirits became more popular by the end of the 20th centuary.

My grandfather had a cider brewery and even the apple juice he made had a bit of alcohol from fruit fermentation. Something below 1% though so we drank it as kids.

I would say in the case of cider you have to drink an awful lot to feel intoxicated, you definitely suffer from diarrea before you feel the alcohol.

Isn't [2] what happens in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis? Postman is drunk every day at work, and his new boss thinks he's got a drinking problem. Turns out he gets served, or even forced to drink a nice glass of liquor at every stop.

Yes that scene hit closed to home when I saw it except in my case it was farms in Normandy.

I remember reading a letter from an Austrian Trappist abbot, from Bosnia in 19th cetury, to his friend in Austria. The letter was mostly complaining about locals excessively drinking plum brandy. He had cut down all the plum trees on church land. Forbade coming drunk to mass, but then people would just get drunk after mass. Founded the first brewery in Bosnia to get the people to switch to beer. Even set up a fruit dryer so that the church would dry the plums for free so that the people did not have to make brandy out of it come winter. In January, a "jolly company" from the village came to visit him thanking him for the the dry plums. Usually by this time they would run out of brandy, now they had dry plums and were making it from them.

Been to Bosnia once or twice. Still hitting plum brandy. They just added beer into the mix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slivovitz for the win.

I still miss the quality homemade one when far away from the Balkans.

Any chance you can point to this letter or the literature? Sounds super interesting.

It was a letter by Franz Pfanner from 1873. Sadly, after a short search, I could only find a version of it in Croatian[1]. Google translate seams to do an ok job on it.

[1] https://www.jergovic.com/ajfelov-most/pater-franz-pfaner-o-v...

Thank you so much. My Croatian friend has agreed to help me with it.

I don't like writing the obvious things that everybody always says, but here we are, nobody has said it yet:

there was a book or paper out like 25 years ago that speculated that as the Age of Enlightenment coincided with the start of European tea and coffee drinking, the general uptick in the usage of stimulants instead of alcohol must have contributed to the intellectual flowering through to the Renaissance, at least for the literate classes.

So that's when one group of people stopped being drunk all the time.

Tobacco also.

I remember a similar read. I think it also helped that armies become more disciplined, could march longer (coffee was a stimulant vs. alcohol), also the workforce had fewer errors. Any chance that somebody knows the reference?

Which way does the causal arrow point?

Yet these stimulants were already consumed in other places in the world - before the europeans. why no Renaissance there? Or yes it had?

https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definition....

That's the difference between a sufficient condition and a necessary condition. It's likely a combination of factors were required that might not have been available in other places. But there were something akin to renaissances in other places before Europe, but changing environments/factors limited their impact or spread, or even outright ended them.

I always find the argument "but why didn't this happen elsewhere" bizarre, when ... it usually has happened elsewhere. Ignorance isn't a great argument. Like, other places often had sewers and other sanitation long before Europe, which implies that alcohol could have been a limiting factor for Europe while not being a limiting factor elsewhere.

There is something really special about European development. Chinese history is absolutely fascinating with a lot of super cool inventions, but nothing stands close to European history and it's power.

You'd need to define that something special, else you sound really racist. More likely Europe stumbled on a couple of things such as reading glasses (that gave much longer working lives to scientists) or the steam engine that gave an advantage.

>You'd need to define that something special, else you sound really racist.

...I think that says more about you than me.

That I'm not racist? What is so special about Europeans?

They don't owe you an explanation just because something they probably said innocently could be construed as having racist undertones. While I'm willing to believe that you believe you are doing the right, anti-racist thing by calling them out, you basically attacked them before knowing what they meant, and that feels more like the bad-faith race-trolling that sometimes pretends to be anti-racism online.

White supremacy is basically this, "we are special". Needs to be called out in its tracks. They don't have to explain, but they can expect push back like I gave and can easily clarify if I was misinterpreting, which they chose not to.

You didn't even establish that they're white before you attacked.

Like I said, I called it out in its tracks and gave them the chance to correct if there was a misunderstanding.

European achievements in the Enlightenment and Rennaissance and Classical Period and Industrial Revolution were special, full stop. You're the racist if you think it's because of their race, as evidenced by you injecting race into the conversation. You see things racially.

The OP said the Chinese did some good things but nothing like the special Europeans. It was clearly a race discussion.

I should probably finish reading it but doesn't "Guns, Germs and Steel" give a totally non-racial explanation for what they are saying?

It does, though, while an interesting story, its been criticized as being one that is inadequately supported.

Industrial-revolution machines were often very angry dragons, requiring constant supervision and attention to avoid explosions or loss of limbs. That must have played a part.

Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain. It makes sense that they wouldn't want to numb it as much as they did before.

I worked in a factory when I was still in school in the 90s. I had to put some metal parts into an injection moulding machine every 21 seconds for 2 stretches of 4 hours with a 45 minute break between. If I missed the 21 second deadline the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at me.

There was a switchboard with buttons for emergency breaks (e.g.toilet break). If you used it the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at you.

I don't write this to complain, actually for me doing this for a couple of weeks during summer recess was quite fun. After this experience I also totally see how you just cannot do a job like that for 40+ years without alcohol.

I did something similar in the early 90s, placing parts into various machines (produced 15000 welding tips in one summer).

At that factory drinking previously had been common among workers. They banned alcohol during weekdays after one worker fell into a spinning milling machine. But even after that those workers who came in on Saturdays were allowed to consume a limited quantity of beer.

When I was there it also was the time when they started to crack down on the alcohol use during working hours, but beer was still allowed and sold during the break.

Many didn't cope well with this and in the building I was working they had thrown out the contents of the first aid boxes to hide the beer bottles there.

> they had thrown out the contents of the first aid boxes to hide the beer bottles there.

Beer works well against acute dehydration.

> Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain.

Not neccessarily. The whole Luddite revolution/movement was trying to fight industrialization _because_ it required less skills, and reduced workers' wages. For example, before the automatic looms were introduced, cloth was produced by hand, by people of significant dexterity and skill. After automation, it was mainly produced by machines which needed only very basic (and low paid) human input here and there.

You make a good point, skilled craftsmanship definitely saw a dive, and certainly factory workers didn't need to be as skilled. But, big picture, each individual became vastly more productive thanks to industrialisation, which made room for more people to get educated and have more intellectual professions (which I think is what OP meant by "skilled", since he made reference to "using their brain"). All in all, I think that the net proportion of skilled labour grew significantly.

> All in all, I think that the net proportion of skilled labour grew significantly.

I'm not so sure. Before industrialization, most jobs were skilled. For one, most people were farmers, and it required a lifetime of knowledge (usually passed on from previous generations). Whereas today, lots (most?) of people are employed in jobs which don't require much training. In factory work jobs, it's enough that you are literate and can do basic arithmetic. In many office jobs and service jobs, it's that plus possibly some basic computer skills. The actual training often takes one day and teaches you everything you need to know to perform the job well.

Maybe industrialization reduced wages for some craftsmen who were forced to become factory workers. But for almost all new factory workers their wealth, working conditions and working hours were a huge step up from their previous occupations as sheep herders, unskilled agri-labourers and subsistence farmers (with side hustles in proto-industrial home work).

Pretty soon the demand (and pay) for skilled craftsmen rocketed back up because the newly affluent workers could now afford to buy more items and some of those were not yet mass-producable.

> But for almost all new factory workers their wealth, working conditions and working hours were a huge step up from their previous occupations as sheep herders, unskilled agri-labourers and subsistence farmers (with side hustles in proto-industrial home work).

That’s the exact opposite of reality. They worked 12-16 hour shifts for unlivable wages, crammed several families per room, and lived without any of the infrastructure that makes high densities livable like modern sewer systems. It was the age of cholera and truly awful living conditions.

People didn’t move into the cities because it was better for them but because industrialization forced them to. Peasants didn’t start asking for worker’s rights until the industrial revolution because it was so much worse than working conditions in subsistence farming.

From what I recall reading, there was a grow in population during XIX century that to this day is still hard to explain by historians. A lot of that surplus population couldn't live off the land, since it was already at capacity in most of the Western Europe, so they moved to cities, hoping to find a living there. This resulted in "infernal cities" of XIX century, as described by Dickers, Zola etc - people dying of starvation of right on the streets of London or Paris, hordes of underage prostitutes roaming the streets etc.

> A lot of that surplus population couldn't live off the land, since it was already at capacity in most of the Western Europe, so they moved to cities, hoping to find a living there.

Weren't inclosure acts a big reason why people moved to the cities, at least in England?

A combination of enclosures (which had be going on for centuries and peaked in the 18th century with the Inclosure Act), and the Agricultural Revolution which greatly reduced the labour required in the fields (so if you had transitioned from working the commons to getting wages for working private land, you just stopped getting enough work).

So you had industrialists setting up factories needing cheap labour to run the machines, and a mass exodus of the countryside population to the cities desperate for work. Hello Dickens.

This is how you get an explosion in petty crime, disease, poverty, hulks, and eventually, transportation of the troublesome poor to Australia.

The industrial revolution was so destabilising to society that colonialism was a very convenient solution. Just go somewhere else, shoot the natives who resist, and the poors can have that land.

Thanks to coffee, that created the coffee break by companies to increase productivity.

Life was harsh, lots of work was physically taxing (no machines to do the heavy lifting), and there was not much in terms of relief for any sort of chronic or recurring pain, like back pain, tooth aches etc. Alcohol helps endure, as it made you more numb to such pains. It might also help you sleep at night, when otherwise your aching body might have kept you awake.

In some physical jobs like the construction business, workers used to rely on alcohol to make through the work day until very recently. In some countries they might even still do so.

I can confirm from my own experience building a house and doing heavy lifting on the construction site, that after 10 hours of taxing work, an evening beer works wonders to relax your strained muscles and regain some feeling of comfort.

It's no surprise to me, that the reduction in alcohol consumption coincides with a switch from more hard physical labor, to more sitting jobs.

There's a vast scientific literature suggesting that even small amounts of alcohol have adverse side effects on sleep. Sleep is the biggest factor in muscle recovery and in reducing inflammation. Therefore the best thing one could do for themselves to accelerate physical recovery would be to drink plenty of water and make sure they get enough hours of sleep.

I think it's a bit like how I crave ice cold Coke when I'm thirsty on a hot summer day but then when I just drink tap water that craving reduces significantly. Therefore I know that my body really needed water but my brain translated in into a craving for Coke. There might be some similar learned behaviours between hard labourers and beer.

I'm pretty sure that most medieval laborers were not aware of that scientific literature ;)

I would like to see a comparison with Asia, where people discover earlier that you can boil water to kill dangerous pathogens, even if they didn't know what pathogens were yet.

Hippocrates recommended that water be boiled and strained to purify it. People in the middle ages boiled, filtered, and even distilled water to purify it.

The catch is that without germ theory, people mostly did this process to water which was obviously contaminated. If water looked clean and tasted clean, why purify it? Even people who should know germ theory still make this mistake—people who go backpacking will take water from a clear stream and drink it, unaware that there is a beaver dam upstream and giardia in the water.

Or Islamic regions.

Hence tea, indeed.

In many ways it filled (and still does, as does coffee) many of the same roles as alcohol. Certainly not the partying aspect, but as a beverage to have with food, relax or socialise with. Alcohol was consumed a lot more often in those more mundane contexts before.

For me it was when I moved from the UK to Silicon Valley.

Got to admit those Friday afternoon "pub lunches" were great for team-building though, right? :_)

It's the thing I miss most about working in the office. We would take an extra long lunch almost every Friday at a local bar down the street, then come back to the office and mostly work on skunkworks projects. Some of our most creative stuff came from those Fridays.

Now my Fridays are filled with the same monotony as the rest of the work week.

People don't know how to work remotely. It's still kind of a new concept in the mainstream after all.

You need to make social engagements during the day with friends. Otherwise it's lonely and isolating. as a nice plus, seeing your actual friends is much nicer than seeing your workplace "friends" who'd likely sell you out for half a dollar.

Go grab lunch at a pub, coffee, do some exercise or whatever.

Between my wife and children and neighbors and friends, I am the opposite of lonely and isolated. Not every remote worker is a hermit.

My company just gives us Friday afternoons off.

As a younger engineer, I had very good times working in Central London and getting hammered with colleagues two nights a week on the regular. With tons of people from other companies at the pub too. I'm all in with remote work but that was pretty nice.

When I started working in the 90s, pub lunch was still everyday, when I started doing consultancy, my mentor loved to take out customers for lunch on expenses. He knew which pub in every town had a lock in as well so it meant late nights too.

I soon stopped drinking at lunch though, never do it anymore, never got much work done in the afternoon and made me a bit too aggressive..

Not really. Being the only woman around a bunch of drunk frat-like guys is not fun.

Hen parties can get pretty obnoxious too.

Ooh, it's all got a bit ill-humoured in this thread; perhaps I should expand. Hen parties (batchelorette parties for left-ponders) can and do get obnoxious, no-one that's been to a pub in the UK could deny that: screaming, splashing Prosecco around, hooting with laughter at giant inflatable penises, I'll discreetly move to a different part of the pub. Do I think them morally reprehensible? Absolutely not, any group of young people drinking will include some who don't drink very often, so don't know their limits. Everyone is obnoxious when they start drinking, but they have to learn somehow (or become teetotal). So while I dislike hen parties, I defend them, you go girl(s). If you feel that way (I think many do), then you really have to afford the same tolerance to groups of young men. That was my point.

Your comment doesn’t seem to come from a bad place but is a bit out of touch in my opinion.

I’m generalising but can imagine that, for a woman, dealing with a group of pissed city boys feels much more uncomfortable than your brush ins with hen do’s.

This is all ignoring the fact that this thread is around drinking during work hours. So I don’t think the comparison to hen do’s is fair in the first place.

This "Sir Galahad" approach of excusing the drunken ladies their misdeeds strikes me as rather like mansplaining, "manexcusing" if you will. Women don't need their bad behaviour explained and excused by men, they are quite capable of suffering the vomiting and hangovers (and learning from them) themselves.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Personal, individual annoyance from a group of women being rowdy vs. the physical aggression, and undertones of violence that are associated with it, that comes from a group of drunk young guys.

There is a lot of low quality comments on this, I feel sorry for that.

What everybody who does not feel well under these conditions should never the less consider is: Connections are formed during these events and collective rule breaking is an effective bonding mechanism. Further more, getting intoxicated together is a convenient way to make statements and have a degree of deniability afterwards.

Is it that Brits drink a lot or that SV nerds drink very little?

probably both

california in general seems to not drink that much. or just the circles i end up in. lots of smokers, vapers and edible eaters i guess

Ironically, I remember reading an article in the SF Chronicle declaring us the best read drunks in the late '90s/early '00s. We were spending more on books and booze than anyone at the time, though that may have changed

New Orleans has entered the chat.

last weekend here in LA, someone told me they dont drink alcohol, and the weirdest part was that they felt compelled to explain why. they must be new here

I mean, it's pretty inconvenient when you have to spend 20min on the freeway to go out

Can you explain in a few words what "edible eaters" are?

THC edibles I think

Yeah this, all weed stuff I mentioned

Brits drink a lot and Californians instead smoke or go hiking.

smoke and go hiking

Yesterday I, a Brit, hiked 25km with the finish line at the pub. Hiking and drinking is not incompatible at all.

>hike >10km and finish at the pub

This is the way

The best hikes are the ones that end at a pub :). There's something magical about that first beer after a long hike that makes even the cheapest/worst lager enjoyable.

It can be ski tour, climb, and probably many more activities. After almost every climb with my buddy we go to some mcdonalds - in general I think very little of the company, but being tired from hard workout makes even junk food taste great. They have these small Heineken cans, I wouldn't normally drink that stuff even if it was for free, but after a good climb or whatever, its the best beer in the world.

Multiple colleagues here in the UK have told me stories about spending time working with Americans and realising their drinking habits around work made them look like alcoholics to the Americans. It's going away with younger generations.

The UK has incredible hiking. All the rambling trails connecting everything are amazing. As bad there is something magical when you’re hiking around and a small country pub pops up.

Did this produce an improvement in your quality of life, or do you miss the drinking?

True. With the current workload I cut out all the drugs. No more alcohol or weed. Money is the best drug :o

For many it's the opposite. They pick up drugs along with the stress. Not to judge but several famous programmers come to mind. :)

you've pique my curiosity, what famous programmers got into drugs?

Whatever keeps them working. Occupationally coffee is good enough for me

Well we're talking, like, hard drugs...

From a German perspective there was the “branntweinpest” in the 19th century in Prussia triggered by cheap and available liquor (Branntwein). This indicates to me that before the availability of cheap liquor alcohol consumption was more limited. Anecdotally I live in a wine growing region but the older generations would drink wine diluted with water, the local wine was a already produced in a way that it wasn’t entirely dry, I.e. more sugar less alcohol in the wine that then was diluted.

So I find it reasonable to believe that people used to be for most centuries consuming alcohol but moderately affected. As in, they would not have appeared heavily intoxicated. Of course it would have affected their health and increased risk to become an alcohol addict, but then, it seems alcohol was actually not so cheap until cheap liquor from grains and potatoes became available.

Beer used to be a seasonal drink due to lack of cooling, or without engineered yeasts it’s alcohol content low.

I remember reading an article one day that pointed out that intoxication is related to consumption in excess of what your liver can process instantaneously, so that a drinking session with a number of 5% beers may get you drunk but the same number of 4% beers will hardly register.

The article is no longer available, but here’s a summary https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3209119/Why-... and here’s a follow-up of sorts https://draftmag.com/how-many-beers-to-get-drunk/

There's a passage in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography when he is working in a printing factory in England, and he astounds the other workers by his productivity. He credits it to not being drunk all the time, and eventually managers to convince the other workers to try it too. That was 1740s I believe.

And did that accrue to the labor force or did the owner just get more profits?

I went and checked for you. The ones who stopped drinking saved a lot of money and were healthier and Franklin actually made money off of the ones who kept drinking by lending them money when they ran out.

The Ballmer Peak for printers.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/ballmer-peak/

Recently, I was drinking with a (Russian) friend who commented that I'm the only one he struggles to keep up with while drinking and that he goes home blackout drunk every time we hang out. We don't drink that much, and decided maybe we're just getting old.

We both noted how we used to drink a lot more, meaning we're just as cool and fashionable as The Kids These Days, who are according to several news reports drinking less than college kids were a decade or so ago.

A few days later, he said he figured it out: for each of the ~3-4% ABV beers I drink, he's drinking a ~7-8% IPA. Him "catching up" (round for round/pint for pint) was consuming twice the alcohol as I was. I said I'd noticed that myself, when moving to a major city where most beers were $8 IPAs - having a couple beers at lunch would make me tired, if not drunk, and I'd need a cup of coffee on the way back to get going again.

I'm too lazy to do The Math, but I can't help but wonder how the "Kids These Days Drink Less Alcohol" charts line up with the "Kids These Days Seem To Prefer IPAs" chart. (It seems ABV has little to do with the historical trend presented here, though)

> Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135, the relative consumption of small and strong beer is depended on whether we use the numbers from “Vandelint 1734” or the estimates in the studies mentioned in table 2.1 in “Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”

If anything I've been seeing the IPA craze die down for some years now (though I am in San Diego, which was kind of at the forefront). I don't know a lot of college kids, but the people in their mid-twenties that I know seem to be shifting away from beer entirely, and are drinking more hard seltzers in casual settings and cocktails in bars. Both can be quite alcoholic.

That said, they're also much more casual about consuming cannabis since it's been legal their whole adult lives, which often leads to them drinking less when they go out.

I found this article a bit hard to follow, though it's an interesting topic.

The constantly changing units of consumption, historical timing, changes between daily and annual rates of consumption and similar made it difficult to understand exactly the point that was being made.

The author dug up a lot of data and put it together, but didn't going the extra step of unifying things in a way that's easy to understand.

I kept having to convert the units they were using to units I could understand, and since those units weren't constant, it's difficult to get an overall impression.

But, a few examples I did convert to amounts of drinking I understand:

* In Florence in 1455, someone (IDK if this is an average, an individual, a certain class of people or what?) drank 250L of wine in a year. That's about .9 modern size bottles of wine per day. A good amount, but I expect if you were practiced at it and drank it fairly evenly throughout the day, you certainly wouldn't appear drunk.

* In the medieval city of Ghent, the apparent average per person annual consumption was ~40-liters wine and ~1300-liters beer. That works out to basically 7.5 pints (16oz, or the size of one of the tall cans of that craft beer often comes in in the US) of beer every day, and a quite small glass of wine. Depending on how strong the beer was (doesn't specify if this was small ~5% or strong ~12% beer), I expect even a practiced drinker would be quite tipsy after close to 8 pints and a touch of wine every day.

* Sailors got a ration of 8 pints of strong (13% ABV) beer a day, which would have me absolutely knocked off my feet. 3 pints of what I think of as strong beer (~6-8%) in any kind of close succession and I'm definitely feeling tipsy, and shouldn't be let anywhere near something so complex as rigging. Though, after reading a few books on naval life aboard 16th century British sailing ships, perhaps being totally out of it for as much of the journey as possible would be a solid survival tactic.

* The "historical average" (IDK what period of history, or how average) beer consumption was around 380 liters per person per year. That's just over 2.2 pints per person per day. A long way from "being drunk all the time", even if it was higher ABV strong beer (and it certainly wasn't all high ABV).

Certainly, people seemed to have drunk much more in the past than they do today, but it's hard to make clear conclusions when the units are all over the place.

Medieval beer was used in place of water and was rated at 2% or less. That was the beer people would drink 1300 liter per year. It was the common way to sanitize water, as the river was the source of clean water and the dumpster for dirty water at the same time.

I think it's worth noting it was the process that sanitised the water, not the alcohol - even raw eggnog with much higher concentrations is considered acceptable for most people but risky for the at-risk, due to eggs being largely but not completely clean.

A good alewife could get the alcohol % even lower by using strong herbs like mugwort.

> It was the common way to sanitize water

That’s mostly a myth.

> as the river was the source of clean water

Also mostly a myth. e.g. they weren’t drinking water from the Thames in medieval London for instance but from the Tyburn river. The case in most cities was that you had stream and springs which were legally protected and you poured your waste downstream into some major river. Obviously shit happened and water sources got polluted from time to time with terrible consequences but they still drank water all the time.

I can't imagine they were drinking it all at once, either. The body eliminates something in the neighborhood of one unit of alcohol per hour— usually considered to be 12oz of 5% beer, 5oz of 12% wine, or 1.5oz of 40% liquor. 8 strong pints over the course of a day is doable. Working as a line cook, many of my coworkers, and points, I myself drank amounts approaching that... And we had completely safe drinking water! I worked at one place where a 6 pack was part of everybody's station setup and customers could buy a discounted 6 pack for the kitchen— and many regularly did.

16+ hour days of hard, hot, hypervigilant, dangerous work with a chunk nearly always unpaid; no health insurance; socially isolated from everyone you don't work with, and they also probably have unhealthy lifestyles... I imagine our reasons weren't much different than others throughout history. Hard to make healthy life choices in that life.

I've heard stories of the healthy, positive and wholesome environments in restaurant kitchens.

But still - by the article's definition, 8 strong pints would be the equivalent of 16 16oz IPAs in a day. I'm sure there are heavy drinkers that could do it and hide it pretty well, but I think your average person would be pretty flat.

I expect I'd be asleep in the corner if not passed out.

I don't think I could physically stomach it anymore. At some point my body would just say no, I'm not drinking that.

I know a bartender who would drink a fifth of whiskey every shift and still be totally coherent at the end of it. (That was a decade ago and she's still a bartender... but I have no idea how much she drinks now.) Some of it has to do with biology, but some people can just adapt.

If you're not actively manoeuvring (or fighting etc), sailing involves a lot of downtime. Once you're at sea and heading in roughly the right direction, there's not a lot of actual sailing work to do, and only so much make and mend that people can stomach. A few pints of strong beer would presumably keep the men happily idle. It's basically early modern suspended animation.

> doesn't specify if this was small ~5% or strong ~12% beer

iirc "beer" as it was back then was more like 0.5% ABV

Beer wouldn't have bee 0.5% historically. Historical recipes where they survive are pretty much exclusively much stronger than this. Moreover a beer at 0.5% will spoil in basically a small number of days, unless it's heavily soured which isn't described in historical sources. Table beer of that strength, while it exists wouldn't be very good as beer. It's a real art to produce a beer that weak that tastes good at all. Moreover manual laborers in fields were drinking beer for calories as much as for hydration, and any beer with a significant calorie count, say 200 will be in the range of 4%. Pre-modern brewing didn't have precise fermentation controls.

The strength of beer is probably way too high. According to Wikipedia "The strength of beers has climbed during the later years of the 20th century. Vetter 33, a 10.5% abv (33 degrees Plato, hence Vetter "33") doppelbock, was listed in the 1994 Guinness Book of World Records as the strongest beer at that time".

So obviously, sailors during the age of sail couldn't have 13% ABV beer. They had rum though, so maybe the drinks they had were mixed with rum to reach 13%.

If sailors were issue "strong beer", I would guess it is like today's regular beer, maybe in the order of 5-6%. As opposed to "small beer", that was maybe 1-2%. Sometimes it was less than 1%, not even enough to qualify as an alcoholic drink in many countries today.

As for wine, it also tended to be weaker than modern wine, most likely under 10%, and it was often watered down.

The reason beer and wine are so consistently strong today is that we have good knowledge of the fermentation process and we are able to precisely control all the variables. They didn't even know what kind of yeast that had back in the days, they mostly used what was floating in the air where they were. Now we have lab grown yeasts, selectively bred for maximum performance.

FWIW the beer people used to drink in antiquity had a rather low ABV.

A better contemporary comparison might be be something like kombucha.

I was thinking this. There were other types of beer and wine that had much lower alcohol content than what is typical today, just barely enough to keep it sterile, but the article mentions that the several liters of beer per day was sometimes 10-15%, which is damn high.

I agree that's a convincing position, but I'm not convinced that it's supported by the evidence.

I remember a story about the dome on the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower (the Duomo in Florence) -- the first and largest unsupported dome in the world in over a thousand years, built before the discovery of the Americas and on a structure that had been otherwise completed for over 130 years at the time (and which had taken 100 years to get there). In the telling, the architect, Filippo Brunelleschi was hired to solve the "how to build the dome" left by his predecessor, Arnolfo di Cambio in around 1300. Cambia had specified something that was basically science fiction at the time, a majestic dome, built without buttresses, using technology nobody knew how to create. A design competition in the mid-1300s reinforced the Florentine's desire for this incredible dome that nobody knew how to build.

The problem? The fucking Pantheon in Rome. It existed, and at that time built over a thousand years prior. It demonstrated that it was possible to build domes and that the technology had been lost to humanity. Artists and architects worth their salt all spent time in Rome learning architecture and design from the ancient ruins, by then nearly a thousand years old.

Brunelleschi, and his best friend Donatello, were no different, having visit Rome sometime in the early 1400s to study. Rome at the time was a decrepit, dangerous, insecure, place to go. However, based on what he learned, Brunalleschi developed concepts of architecture, light, balance, and other ideas, which garnered him commissions back in Florence. Based on his work and excellent delivery, the Medici (THE Medici family) hired him to build various things including the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. Which, if you've been there, feels like a frustrated first draft of the Duomo. The Basilica of Santo Spirito is the second draft.

Along the way he started working with vaults, then domes (very important!)

There was a competition, Brunalleschi's friend, Donatello, provided an absolutely incredible scaled demo of Brunalleschi's concept, and he won the competition against rival Ghiberti.

Once he won the commission, he set to work figuring out how to actually do it at scale. The "dome within a dome" architectural idea he inherited from prior work (technological debt!), but set out to create several new management and construction innovations which included:

- a maturing of the "dome within a dome" concept

- new hoisting machines

- new designs which eliminated legacy concepts such as flying buttresses and strengthened traditional bricklaying concepts

- entirely new management concepts:

1. Workers stay up in the construction site, going up and down hundreds of stairs was a waste of time (e.g. context shifting).

2. Resources, such as food and wine were to be brought to the workers in-place to save time and improve productivity.

3. The wine was to be diluted with water, similar to the quality of wine brought to pregnant women, this prevented drunkenness, as well as water-borne illnesses, which made the workers more productive.

The dome, the lantern on top, and the four surround mini-dome took from 1420-1445 (with the dome completed in 1436). Remember, this was to build something had been lost, science fiction, technology of the ancients, merely a hundred years prior.

Lessons for today:

1. Study what's come before

2. Honor your predecessors, but invent anyway

3. Focus on worker productivity, don't waste their time with context switching and perks that provide "nutrition-free" benefits.

Other observations:

1. Humans had identified alcohol as both a way to make water safer to drink, and a problem for pregnant women. Fetal alcohol syndrome had been observed and a reduced intake of alcohol had been identified as a way to reduce the problem.

2. It was possible to negotiate worker relations in such a way that they didn't hate, offered them benefits, and improved productivity.

3. Everybody competes, killer demos and prior work win future work.

> as well as water-borne illnesses

How? There isn’t enough alcohol in wine to kill much bacteria, especially if you mix it with water.

Is it just me or does this read like a highschool paper with wikipedia sources?

It does. There's an overuse of graphs and especially the lack of units and y-axis labels on some of the graphs was annoying, but overall it's still a quite interesting and entertaining read in my opinion.

Substack is a good display of why editors exist. Any time I read a Substack link on HN, it's twice as long as it needs to be.

I always thought "Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink" didn't refer to alcohol at all, but was simply pointing out that sailors can ironically die of thirst on a ship literally surrounded by water, because salt water isn't drinkable.

Never heard it before but what you say sounds correct.

One point the article is missing is that when you do hard physical labor you won't even notice a couple beers drunk across the day. Which is not what happens when you sit on your ass in an office and have 3 beers in quick succession right after work.

When Benjamin Franklin went to London to apprentice as a printmaker, his English peers in the print shop were impressed with both his industry and productivity. One other significant difference was that unlike his coworkers, he didn’t drink on the job.

The first (iirc) Connections follows this and the changes that come from the introduction of coffeehouses (buzz vs blitz) through to the present (at least, 1970's) day.

> the elimination of “sacred Monday” as a day in which time is taken off work

According to the table 3.10 [0], leisure time was greater on Monday than on Sunday.

Do I understand it correctly? Monday was the previous Sunday in Christian societies?

[0] https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/9...

> Do I understand it correctly? Monday was the previous Sunday in Christian societies?

Not sure exactly, but I think Sunday was always Sunday. It's Saturday that changed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Monday

I remember reading somewhere that historically, the alcohol content in beer was considerably lower (as low as 0.5% IIRC) than it is today. I'm not sure if the article takes this into account - I might have missed that detail.

Not sure if the author is here, but small typo at the end:

> The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol