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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

look. this is going to sound unpopular but is there a study that compares effects of alcohol in general as compared to non alcohol consuming nations?

like around 1.2-1.5 billion people who call themselves muslims abstain from alcohol so there should be significantly less effects of the diseases associated with alcohol consumption in those places.

like i can say this with certainty, in my city, there is NEVER DUI accidents. We just have never heard of them. Same for alcohol induced Cirrhosis. We just don't have that. Neither do we have alcohol overdose or an alcohol epidemic that requires assistance of alcoholic anonymous and other groups. Those problems simply do not exist so that is something objective i can share without a need for a study

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The problem is that is not one to one. And isolating diet is very hard. Muslin countries don’t do alcohol, but they smoke a lot more than in comparison to some other countries. As well as different general diet behaviours.

So as much as your idea has some logic, it is still very hard to get the right picture.

And now if we all are being honest, most of those studies are done with intention of understanding how much one can drink with much harm. So comparing a group of people who doesn’t drink at all with one that drink is not the correct data points. We all know that alcohol is bad. If people want to be healthy they can simply not drink. We don’t do studies to understand “how many cigarettes a day is good for your health” we simple know the best amount is zero. But alcohol is deep into our society habits

> like around 1.2-1.5 billion people who call themselves muslims abstain from alcohol

Right, and all 2.4 billion people who call themselves christians all love their neighbors?

> We just have never heard of them.

You can read that in two very different ways. While I presume there will be less incidents if alcohol use and especially alcohol abuse is not normalized in a society there are lots of people calling themselves muslims in the world that did or do drink alcohol.

>there are lots of people calling themselves muslims in the world that did or do drink alcohol.

i am saying the societal pressure TO DRINK is not present in 1.5 billion people. someone who wants to still go ahead and drink isn't being discussed.

Someone who drinks must be discussed if you're designing a study about the effects of alcohol. The reason is irrelevant.

One can, for example, imagine a world where a culture of covert hidden drinking in specific Muslim countries gives the proposed benefits of moderate drinking to some of the population. A study that assumed no Muslims drank would thus be flawed because it would include a group that actually was drinking all along.

> A study that assumed no Muslims drank would thus be flawed

Well gee, I guess you're right. If only there were some sort of test to determine if a person had been drinking, and how much alcohol they'd had. Someone should get right on that.

What test that can determine someone has never drank alcohol?

Moving the goalposts, eh?

Knowing someone who is a regular binge-abuser of alcohol, they just don't drink (for many days) before blood tests - their ranges go down.

You guys don't seem to care about the extreme market differences that may prevail in a culture where nobody is even supposed to be drinking.

Certainly a binge-abuser can get a hold of alcohol on the black market at a certain price, but in general, if Islam is established somewhere such that the corner liquor stores don't carry liquor at all, how many people will be alcoholics on the D.L. anyway?

If alcohol can't be had on the market under normal circumstances, is it not reasonable and rational to presume that most subjects would not be clandestine binge-alcoholics who hide it so well that weekly testing won't catch it? I mean, really.

They're not moving the goalposts because the goalposts were never where you thought they were. There's nothing wrong with proposing a study such as yours but if you don't anticipate all the possible influences on your study then you'll only end up with data which is (potentially unknowingly) incorrect.

What is the exact proposal here? Since the liver metabolises alcohol so quickly, and since these studies would follow a cohort over many months, you'd need to test the participants very frequently to catch moderate drinking.

I mean, sure, you can administer a breathaliser when they walk into their monthly appointment with the staff who're surveying them, but that's hardly going to detect a glass of wine they had last Saturday.

That pressure isn't present just like it wasn't during prohibition. It's like weed in the 2000s in the US. It's easy to get and people enjoy it. Unlike basically any other drug, you can make it at home very easily.

A closer analogy would be like how sex before marriage was treated in "Christian" countries. Something most people did, but was an easy way to attack people by pretending you didn't engage.

You cannot rely on all Muslims not having alcohol. Most Muslims I know (not an unbiased sample for multiple reasons!) do drink alcohol.

Social pressure may mean people drink with friends but not in front of family or their community, or keep alcohol in their bedrooms and drink alone? Both certainly happen (no idea how much, probably varies wildly between communities).

> in my city, there is NEVER DUI accidents. We just have never heard of them

How often are drivers tested for alcohol? How good is prosecution and reporting? Can people bribe their way out if caught?

> Neither do we have alcohol overdose or an alcohol epidemic that requires assistance of alcoholic anonymous and other groups.

Again, you may the the problems but not the help because the existence of the problem is not publicly acknowledged.

It is even worse of you try to compare on a national level. There might be smuggling and home brewing.

Most importantly, any religion will cause multiple lifestyle changes. In the case of Islam some are obvious - not eating pork, Ramadan fasts, prayer times. Religious ideas change attitudes to sex, money and career, family life - pretty much your entire lifestyle.

It is even worse on a national level. A lot of differences between the US and the UK can be traced to differences in the different branches of the same religion that was dominant.

The most obvious is politics. In the 80s and 90s the largest Christian church in the UK was criticising the government for policies it regarded as not fair on the poor (welfare spending etc.) and most people belonging to the second largest voted for an outright socialist party. We do not even have a noticeable "religious right". Different from the US!

More relevant to the topic at hand is the huge and obvious difference in attitudes to alcohol. Similar differences between historically Catholic and protestant countries in Europe.

There's a lot to say about how the right took over large parts of Christianity in the US. It seems to have been in the right backwater of the counterculture and very much on purpose. Before, Christians in the US were very much like Christians in the rest of the world. Taking care of the poor is a central tenet of Jesus' teachings.

Is it true people won’t even use alcohol as disinfectant?

nope. total BS. you know something about denatured alcohol. It cant be consumed so its fine for any use. like COVID brought hand sanitizers everywhere and it caused no problems.

Can you explain a bit about denatured alcohol? I searched about alcohol in hand sanitizer but didn't find anything useful

denatured:

(2) Of alcohol made undrinkable, by adding a toxin or unpalatable substance, but still useful as a fuel or solvent. Traditionally by the addition of methanol (wood alcohol) to ethanol (grain alcohol).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/denatured

seems like there should be more information here, but I didn't look

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

Wait, shouldn't hand sanitizer food-grade? Wouldn't making it poisonous be very dangerous?

only poisonous in quantity, small amounts like from your hand would be tolerable. We just don't want alcoholics drinking a whole bottle to feed their addiction and then winding up blind.

In the US, hand sanitizer must be mostly ethanol or isopropyl alcohol. They're denatured to make unsafe for consumption and avoid certain classes of taxes on alcoholic beverages.

> nope. total BS.

It’s not total bullshit, whatsoever. I’ve known a good few Muslims, who would not use alcohol, as either a disinfectant, or topical liniment - due to their Wahhabi interpretation, of the Quran.

There’s a whole thread, from over a decade ago, on a Kung Fu forum, where a “revert” went into depth, about why he could not purchase, or create a bruise liniment, from ethanol, because he claimed it went against the Quran. This despite the fact, the end product would be highly poisonous, and thereby de facto denatured…

I’ve also trained with people, who would only use liniments made from vinegar, as the base, for similar reasons.

So yes - some Muslims, will not use any alcohol products, whatsoever, for any reason!

>due to their Wahhabi interpretation, of the Quran.

This is not necessarily the case. For example, the Shafi'i school of jurispudence deems all liquid intoxicants are impure (as in, physically) and impermissible to trade in regardless of source. The only path to purity is turning say wine into vinegar (though there is some nuance here). This school has a very rich history and has existed far long before ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was born and is followed by the majority of Muslims in south east Asia, Jordan and parts of the Levant, Kurdistan, the Caucasus, Somalia, and other places.

Due to the prevalence of liquid intoxicants in modern manufacturing and the world at large, sometimes scholars of this school deem the presence of intoxicants in certain products excusable to use under certain conditions. This is according to pre-existing principles regarding difficulty, need, etc. (rather than "clergymen making things up").

As a side note, amongst "Wahhabis", jurispudence is not universal, unlike theology. For example, you can find people who may be called a "Shafi'i Wahhabi", i.e., a Wahhabi that follows the Shafi'i school of jurispudence. Though the term Wahhabi isn't typically appreciated by them. There is a style of jurispudence that is mostly popular amongst them (and not most other Muslims), however it is does not necessarily lead to "harsh" or strict views that outsiders assume of them.

Hi - it wasn’t my intention, to insinuate that that Wahhabi dogma, is universally interpreted - but merely to demonstrate that some Muslims, do indeed eschew alcohol, in any form. I have grown up, around Muslims, all my life - and I know for a fact, the person whom I referred to, in my earlier anecdote, was a follower of the Wahhabi doctrine - and gave me his reasoning as to why he couldn’t use alcohol based liniments, as such.

Someone had been relating story about bus driver in Islamabad/Anantnag who wouldn’t

Some Muslims deem that acceptable, some do not. The former view, anecdotally, seems to be the overwhelmingly more popular view (though even those adopting this view can differ in reasoning).

There is a general license in islamic theology that when it comes to life and death situations you are allowed to break almost any of the rules temporarily (survival overrides close to any other religious obligation/rule).

This includes eating pork and drinking alcohol (say if they are the only food beverages available, or if you need to drink alcohol to manage exceptional medical conditions). So it is likely you can make an argument for alcohol as disinfectant if it is the only one available with its impact/cost.

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