The flip-flop on whether alcohol is good for you (2023)
slate.com
slate.com
And articles like this one have been appearing in some variation my entire life. My take away, long ago, is that nutrition is fundamentally complex and poorly understood topic and any extreme opinions are likely to be inverted.
On the topic of alcohol, one things that has really become clear to me, is how directly tied to my environment drinking is. I've always liked to have a beer with dinner, but whether or not that was my only drink or one of many has much less to do with my personal decisions and much more to do with my environment, and I've noticed the same goes for most people.
Many of us became pretty serious drinkers during the pandemic. As it eased up I never made the decision to drink less, I just naturally drank less.
Point being is that no only am I skeptical of the claims of what I should and should not consume, I'm skeptical of entirely how much agency I have to change what I should consume baring case where the impact is immediate.
Can you elaborate on what you mean that you're skeptical of how much agency you have to change what you should consume? A common definition of addiction is that it is the inability to control your consumption. However, "I never made the decision to drink less, I just naturally drank less," doesn't sound anything like addiction.
I began drinking both more frequently and in increased amounts of alcohol during the pandemic, but for me, this didn't stop or ease up until I made a conscious decision to stop. For me, it was habitual. And with habit came increased tolerance.
However, for the smaller things that "aren't good for you" in a less immediate sense, I don't think we have as much control over our behaviors as we'd like to believe.
Another example is obesity. Many people still chalk this up to a "moral issue" where people are making "poor choices", but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why we live in an obesity epidemic. I personally don't think people in 2024 are dramatically less "moral" than they were in 1990.
My personal pandemic realization was that I'm far more of a node in a network of cells in a vast social organism that is humanity than I am an individual actor.
I'm going to add to the noise and give a "simple" answer: Prosperity and availability.
Years ago I read an interview with an applied mathematician who did a lot of research on how food impacts the body - from a math perspective. He said that many things impact a person (and society's) weight. You've got the type of diet (carbs/proteins/fat/fiber). You've got the components of the food (stuff in nutrition labels). You've got genetic factors. You've got parasites. Health issues like hypothyroidism. And more.
But they don't impact you equally. When looking at the contributions of each factor to the rise of obesity, one item stood out clearly:
The production (or rather, overproduction) of food. It's really that simple. As the decades go on, we produce more food per capita than in the past. Some of it, of course, is wasted. But otherwise, the food has to go somewhere. And that somewhere is us.
From what I've read, in the 1960's, the average plate size was 75% of what it is today. Most people don't measure the amount of food they put in a plate. They eyeball how "full" the plate appears. Increase the plate size, and you increase your food consumption. When I switched to smaller plates, I still feel satiated - I'm likely still overeating.
In the US, finding smaller plates (that are not flat, and not bowls) is not easy. I had to resort to visiting Chinese/Korean/Japanese stores to buy them. Presumably they still use smaller plates in those countries.
How often do you feel hungry? Not craving hungry but stomach pangs hungry? I was very thin when young and was known to eat little. Hunger pangs were part of daily life (and not a sign of malnourishment). You eat breakfast, and you should get hungry by the time you eat lunch, and so on.
I now go months before I feel any such thing. I often skip lunch altogether. Part of it is due to slowing metabolism, for sure. But the reality is I'm eating quite a bit for breakfast and random snacks.
I grew up in other countries. Portion sizes at restaurants in the US are huge. For a long time I avoided eating at such places because it was just too much food. I often would have enough leftovers for another meal. People who consume a whole entree are likely eating way too much.
And that problem exists everywhere. In other countries, the standard Pepsi can was 330ml, and you could easily buy 220ml ones. In the US, it's gotten hard for me to find a chilled 350ml can when I'm on the go. Regular grocery stores don't carry them. Now most gas stations/convenience stores don't either. You get 500ml bottles/cans. Ever read the nutrition label on them? 500ml bottles are listed as 2.5 servings. People consuming them are consuming a lot.
I've mostly switched to the 220ml cans for soda. It's extremely rare that I drink one and think to myself "That really wasn't enough. I need to drink more!"
Tic Tac boxes are larger in the US than in many other countries.
The nearby Target only has "supersize" chocolates at the checkout register. You want a smaller portion size? You need to buy a whole box.
I won't even get into cookies. They're huge in the US.
Milk shake type drinks are both huge and loaded. In many countries, the portion size is small (e.g. 250ml), and they have the good sense not to put ice cream in it!
Desserts, in general, are crazily loaded. Any dessert that's over 350 calories is too much. Dessert is supposed to be a "sweet extra", not a whole meal. I'm looking at a popular chain's milkshake calories. The lowest is 680. The highest is 1160.
Often, when you get a dessert item from a restaurant, you are consuming the calories of 1-2 meals just from the dessert alone.
I won't even talk about cheesecakes!
Sorry, I know it's distracting from your overall point. Of course, environment matters. If you happen to have a lot of junk food at home, it's hard not to eat it. If you go to stores that have your favorite snack by the counter, it's hard not to buy. These do play a role. But as the researcher said, it's secondary/tertiary.
But to anyone trying to figure out why it's so hard to lose weight:
1. Get smaller plates.
2. Try to reduce food intake so you feel hungry at least once per day (I achieve this for a while, and then drop the ball). Don't feel bad if for a long time you're having only 2 (or even 1) meal per day. It'll take a while before your body will feel hungry.
3. Drink soda in the smallest 220-250ml cans/bottles. Prefer Izze over Pepsi/Coke. And prefer Spindrift over all (it's OK that Spindrift is over 300ml!)
4. Avoid foods that trigger cravings. The usual offenders are fried/salty foods. If you get soda cravings, track whether you just ate some fried/salty food. If you want an extreme experiment, try eating really bland foods. You'll notice you probably never get a soda craving.
Yes. I made flatbread in the pan yesterday from water, flour, and some spices.
They do it in the present.
Greetings from Europe. I hold in my hand a loaf of cheap (€1.20) supermarket bread, which tastes perfectly pleasant. The little supermarket on my street moves a full shelf of this every day.
The ingredients are:
- Wholewheat flour
- Water
- Wheat gluten
- Yeast
- Malt flour (barley, wheat)
- Rye sourdough powder
- Salt
- Sesame seeds
- Poppy seeds
- Polenta
- Rapeseed oil
I have experienced the bread in the USA and it tastes like a light cake. The sugar makes it cloying to my taste. I guess it's all about what you're used to. But yes, bread without sugar is a very normal thing, and I wouldn't want sugar in mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malt#:~:text=modifying%20the%2....
Also, it is pretty easy to buy bread not containing sugar in the US.
After reading I can't help but think environment is the major component in this system. Why don't you have a bunch of junk food at your house? Why don't you like those sugar bomb milkshakes and cookies? Why don't you like those restaurant portion sizes that you can take home afterwards? Why haven't you increased your food intake?
To me the answer is obviously your environment (or at least, your past environment). I too immigrated to the US and all the nutritional recommendations from the USDA never made a single difference to us or any of the immigrant families we were friends with. We came with our own developed food cultures that were hundreds of years old and each family educated their children and helped them develop their sense of taste. "We can make it better at home" is a common refrain when talking about going out to eat and we look at all junk food as either downright revolting or a rare guilty pleasure that we usually regret afterwards.
Well, if you encompass everything in the environment, then yes, it depends entirely on the environment :-)
No, I don't think it's particular to the culture in the US. Or rather, it's not the culture that made us produce more food per capita over time. It's the fact that we produced more food per capita that made the food cheap that made Americans consume more (both more healthy food and junk food - both are bad).
And you see it in other countries where the economy allowed for cheaper food (whether via import or domestic production). They experience significant weight gains as well, typically regardless of the prevailing food culture.
> "We can make it better at home" is a common refrain when talking about going out to eat and we look at all junk food as either downright revolting or a rare guilty pleasure that we usually regret afterwards.
You project too much. Prior to my coming to the US, I ate junk food - both outside and at home. My like/dislike of junk food didn't change in the US - it's been fairly consistent both prior and after. What has changed is the portions.
As I said, portion size is primary. The ingredients/quality is secondary/tertiary.
Don't forget parents making their kids eat everything on their plate so they don't waste food. It was so normal and common in the 90s (and maybe earlier) it became a stereotype.
Normal much earlier than the 90s. In the 80s this was “there are starving kids in Africa so you can’t waste your food”.
In the late 70s I went to a primary school where children were not allowed to go out to play at lunchtime if they didn’t clear their plates and eat the pudding/dessert/whatever. Compelled eating, with almost no choice in meal.
They had been doing that since the 1940s, when state-provided school dinners became law, and all through rationing, when really only children got “more than enough” food.
In the UK, rationing lasted so long after the war that many first time parents in the 70s and into the eighties had experienced life under rationing during their childhood.
In my parents’ case, they both had memories of rationing starting, and my father was in his mid twenties when it finally ended.
During the rationing era, food waste and getting more food than you were entitled to were crimes punishable by imprisonment, and wasting food remained a major social faux pas until the 90s.
There is an excellent pizza restaurant one minute’s walk from my house, which does takeaway food. When I moved here I made a commitment to never order a takeaway from it, and in 18 years I never have.
I have no sugar in my house. In terms of sweet food I never buy more than I would feel was acceptable to eat in a day or so, and I go five or six days between shopping trips.
Aside from odd occasions in a pub, I haven’t had a fizzy drink with sugar in it for fifteen years, and I do not buy even the sugar free stuff to keep in the house.
6. You probably don’t need to eat red meat very often. Cutting back and finding alternatives will improve your diet.
7. Vegetables fill you up. Find at least one you like. Learn how to cook it. Then make it your longer term goal to find five more.
8. Only add salt when cooking —- if at all. And then less than you think you need. Herbs add flavours that can replace salt, and you can learn that by not buying salt for a while.
None of these habits are clever or pious. They all rely on the fact that I am an idiot with lifelong ARFID and little to no moral courage or willpower, and this means impactful decisions need to be taken where they are the easiest, and bigger changes need to be spread out over years.
Unless you have salt-dependent hypertension (and most people, even those with hypertension, do not), there is very little to be gained from leaving salt out. Things should not taste salty, necessarily, but salt improves the flavor of just about everything. Buy a tube of frozen creamed corn and it tastes like paste. Add salt and it's sweet. The caloric content has not changed; your taste perception has.
When recipes state "season to taste", they're telling you to put salt in. No amount of herbs can replace salt. Small amounts of salt will take the burned flavor away from bad coffee (it mitigates your perception of bitter flavors to make them more pleasant-bitter rather than bitter-bitter). Your natural thirst mechanisms will deal with the rest.
I really hope you (or anyone else!) weren't going to saying anything bad about cheesecakes. This is a perfect food given to humanity like a divine gift. As far as I know, and do not correct me, is that its nutritional content adapts exactly to what your body requires at the time of eating. It is a perfect food. And also delicious. I am not biased.
This is also why food plates are often quite small in places with open buffet (hotel breakfasts, events with catering)
But some people did incorrectly believe that tomatoes were poisonous.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-w...
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ames-test-and-real...
> Plants have evolved a variety of pesticides and antifeedant compounds, many of which are reactive and toxic at some level - therefore, most (as in 99.99%, according to his estimate) of the pesticides in the human diet are those found in the plants themselves. The cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, mustard and so on) are particularly rich in compounds that will light up an Ames test. A fine article of his from 1990 (Ang. Chem. Int. Ed.,29, 1197) states that ". . .it is probably true that almost every plant product in the supermarket contains natural carcinogens."
With near zero accountability for bad science and journalism this situation isn't likely to change any time soon.
1. An ascertainment bias that is built in to studies that recruit and compare “non-drinkers” to light drinkers. Non-drinkers may not be as inherently healthy as light drinkers. They may have had adverse effects earlier in their lives due to alcohol.
2. Since the 1970s most of NIH research has focused on alcoholism and alcohol abuse—-not on the epidemiologucal impact of drinking alcohol. These are entire distinct topics. Alcoholism is treated as a “disease” in the same way as other addictions. But a significant majority of drinkers are not alcoholics, and what is the impact on mortality of alcohol use on all types of age related diseases.
3. There was a long-term phantasy that resveratrol in red wine is responsible for the French paradox metabolic benefits. That gas been debunked for a decade but still lives in our brains as a zombie meme.
I’m similar in that I’ll drink more or less based on environment; a vacation on the beach, I’ll probably drink more. A vacation in the Middle East, I’ll likely drink not at all.
But I don’t really care. I’ll enjoy drinks sometimes and skip others.
Some people really just want to have best practices defined for them, like they can be happy if they check the right boxes.
I am trying to interpret what you said in the best possible way, but I'm not sure how. Maybe you don't have alcohol problems, but some people do (like I used to) and they absolutely should control their alcohol intake. Maybe you don't have obesity problem, but some people do, and they absolutely should count calories.
Maybe you rebuttal is "obviously if you have problem with X you should improve your X", but then your statement comes off a vacuously true.
Even worse, your sage advice may make it worse and make people think that their alcoholism/obesity is not a problem, because they just eat/drink what they enjoy, as much as they want. Believe me, as a (former?) alcoholic, "it's ok to drink as long as you are great at your job and healthy" is exactly what I wanted to hear (and believe).
Scientific nutrition is mostly just "scientism" - an irrational overconfidence bordering on a religious faith in unfounded assumptions based on observational studies, without admitting what we don't know.
I think it is reasonable to avoid trying to make decisions about diet based on this stuff, but I think ideas like the paleo diet or evolutionary nutrition make a lot of sense- eat diets similar to those that humans have eaten safely for a long time, as those are what we are likely adapted to. Interestingly though this itself is massively diverse: there are hunter gatherer societies with almost every diet composition imaginable: from artic diets that are high protein and fat but nearly zero carb, to cultures like the kitavans whose diet is very high carb and low protein. Our metabolism is very adaptable and any diet that is mostly fresh nutrient dense foods from plant and/or animal sources is probably about equally healthy.
Ironically, the stress of worrying constantly about if your food is optimally healthy, is probably more harmful to your health than anything typically considered unhealthy.
I'm not talking about observational studies either, but actual controlled feeding trials where they put you on a strictly controlled diet for a period of time.
Even if you look at what humans are evolved to eat -- evolution puts selective pressure on reproductive fitness. As a process, it does not put any pressure on you to live a long time, as long as you reproduce successfully (which is why insects like the mayfly can even exist). So looking at what primitive people ate does not really give us information about what is healthy if you want to live a long time (aside from avoiding things that are obviously immediately poisonous).
Even hunter gatherer tribes that eat a meat-and-dairy-heavy diet like the Maasai have been examined and have pretty significant cardiovascular disease -- but they are also so ridiculously active their blood vessels are much wider than people with a modern sedentary lifestyle, and that mostly balances out the narrowing from arterial plaque. Native people who eat a traditional diet heavy in whole grains, legumes, and tubers for calories have them beat by a mile when it comes to arterial health.
Moreover, saying the history of human diets gives us no information is just incorrect. It’s not the final word on nutrition, but it is the obvious Bayesian prior. When you raise any animal in a zoo, or culture a microbe in a lab the first thing you do is mimic its natural environment as well as you can, at least until you understand more.
Personally- I am much more interested in quality of life aka things like “reproductive success” than lifespan in my own health, but I am also skeptical that they are at odds. I am an active person and enjoy being physically strong, high energy, etc.
At the end you imply that your preferred diet (presumably high saturated fat, low carb, low fiber) makes you stronger and gives you more energy than the alternatives. But that's not the trade-off nor implication that can be drawn from our ancestors eating what was available to them for survival. We can do better in 2024 than use narratives about the past to dictate how we eat today.
You should listen to this debate between Matthew Nagra and Anthony Chaffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FFV0w55k2I -- You will find yourself making the same points as Chaffee, but go see if you are as equally stumped by the evidence that Nagra provides.
I don’t follow any diet fads or protocols, and don’t do lc/hf as you are implying, other than avoiding processed food in favor of actual plants and animals. However, I am a competitive strength athlete, and do keep protein high when preparing for a competition- because I can directly measure the positive results in my performance. Carbs and fiber seem to be just as important- even sugar e.g. from fruit is a great fuel for replenishment of glycogen and reducing stress from intense exercise. I have friends that are masters strength athletes in their 70s and 80s and they have incredible quality of life for their age, simply because they are still strong and active.
I’ll take a look at the video, sounds interesting.
That's true but our ancestors weren't some poor apes constantly on the verge of starvation scrounging for any kind of food they can find. If contemporary tribes are any indication, in the tropics food was very plentiful and their diet was diverse, long before they started domesticating animals and cultivating plants. These ecosystems support hunter gatherer tribes to this day, the last few remaining holdouts from agriculture and pastoralism. That allowed archaic humans to spread as far east as Indonesia more than a million years before they made it north of the Mediterranean.
https://peterattiamd.com/understanding-cardiovascular-diseas...
https://health.gov/our-work/nutrition-physical-activity/diet...
The evidence and scientific consensus are still against your wishful thinking. Though these days with algorithmic doom-scroll feeds it can feel like there is no consensus.
I follow a lot of evidence based nutrition accounts on Twitter yet I still get recommended quacks like Shawn Baker and Nina Teicholz (carnivore diet charlatans) who make the same points you make to story-tell away the inconvenient truth. And I specifically avoid anti-science quackery. So I can imagine what the average person is seeing and why it seems like the science is reversing.
Being able to come up with a single plausible mechanism like you posted makes sense in isolation, but not when you consider the bigger systems level picture of a whole organism and chemically complex foods, and the fact that anyone who has taken undergrad biochem could come up with a dozen that are equally plausible and consistent with the literature but in the opposite direction. I’ll mention Chris Masterjohn, not because I agree with him, but because he’s a nutrition guru that is great at coming up with dozens of plausible mechanisms that argue against what you are saying. That type of mechanistic reductionist reasoning is the main reason nutrition advice is so falsely overconfident and mostly nonsense.
>When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
So I think there's a relativity of wrong problem that you run into when suggesting it's all just so complex and leaving it at that.
I would nevertheless absolutely agree that nutrition science and communication around it has been disorganized, contradictory, and without much in the way of a north star or a reliable "vanguard" of communicators representing a firm consensus. I feel much better about public communication from, say, astrophysics, archeology, geology, etc. and I think there's a characteristic degree of stability of knowledge particular to each of those fields.
It's fascinating that, at least on some axes, we might know less about core processes in our own bodies than we probably have already ascertained about planetary motion or materials composition from millions of miles away.
The problem with talking about human variability is that everyone can be equally wrong just due to the natural distribution.
What if a 30% of people have metabolisms that work better with low-fat/high-carbs, 30% high-fat/low-carbs, and 40% are kinda just in the middle and don't care as long as macros are balanced? Depending on how your sample breaks down (or which group has the most lobbying capital when the rules are made), your nutrition guidance can flip flop, especially if the effects are subtle except over the long term. Without the ability to group them a priori, the results will be all over the place and may even be unstable depending on whose thumb is on the scale.
Psychiatry faces this problem but much worse. Tons of drugs do work, we just don't know which ones will work for which people so both the treatment protocol and the clinical trials are a complete mess.
yet earth is spherical, just not a perfect sphere.
I sort of lucked into a much healthier diet during the pandemic —- I had suspected Covid just before the UK lockdown, managed to get a supermarket delivery slot, panic-bought a load of healthy food and veg and then spent the next ten days reading recipes and rediscovering cooking for myself, as I tried to make things I could taste. Also developed quite a usefully healthy dependency on apples.
Both of these stuck, and I don’t really know why; habits are confusing to me because I am so disordered otherwise.
It’s interesting how the pandemic affected people in ways they might not have expected, with or without the benefits of furlough or the new-to-many experience of WFH.
Science does not that you that. It just tells you that there is no healthy amount of alcohol to consume. Science also tells you that there is no healthy amount of tan, but you still need the sun to get vitamin D. Leaving it still up to you what to do with that information.
But remember, these specimens were collected from dead persons, people who had died from something, usually something caused by alcohol. So even if alcohol consumption somehow protects one against atherosclerotic plaque, there are many other manifestations of alcohol use that can kill you, and leave your friendly neighborhood pathologist musing about your wonderfully clean arteries, while your organs lie, dead and removed from your rotting corpse, on the demonstration table.
This is so depressing, I'm going to have a drink,
Especially with alcohol it can be difficult to moderate due to social pressure and such. Many friends seems to acknowledge that light drinking isn't harmful, but given they don't see that as an option.
For many that grew up in US drinking culture, the choice is surprisingly binary: binge drink or abstain completely.
Half of Americans don't drink regularly, which is several times the abstaining population in the UK (for example.) Of those who do, 24% binge drink and 6.2% have more than two drinks a day. every day of the week.
That works out to 12% and 3% respectively.
https://alcohol.org/professions/
I don't have data for the US, but in the UK, the alcohol industry makes most of its profits off alcoholics, with harmful/hazardous drinkers making up 25% of the drinking population, but ~66% of its profits.
https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research-post/alcohol-sales-...
~4% (the harmful drinkers) drink one third of all the alcohol sold in the UK.
Heavy drinkers tend to not move from whatever bar they start at, and this is why "happy hour" exists. It's literally bars 'bidding' over who gets the alcoholics for the night. That's why some states have banned the practice.
Both viewpoints are entirely valid, but being reminded that the actual risk of dying from any of the mechanisms alcohol interacts with are very low to start with, so small increases in those risks does not add up to much ... per individual.
As a society of millions, of course, the product of the shift in probability and population is quite significant.
The difference between these two perspectives is often ignored, or at best elided.
[1] e.g. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Otherwise, and being French, we heard it all. Sometimes it’s wine, others it’s butter, cheese, etc when it’s not like “God was born in France” type of thing.
I’m Breton first, Irish second and then eventually French when they’re playing the World Cup, but seriously there are some enzymes, dietary habits and so on that do justify some of the findings.
They used to serve red wine in schools until late 70’s or 80’s can’t remember but there are definitely DNA, habits, regional effects that do come into place I believe.
This said, Bretagne is special regarding this :) (sorry, couldn't help)
A glass of orange juice is about the equivalent sugar of two large oranges, without any of the fiber to slow the digestion. Similarly, a beer is about the equivalent ethanol of an entire loaf of bread, without any of the fiber to slow the digestion.
What a waste of a thread. Of course msm science reporting is trash I can get that discussion on a bad reddit thread.
Alcohol is a poison, a fairly tolerable one. It's also an addictive drug on social, biochemical, and emotional levels. And likely something that there has been coevolution with humans over the thousands of years it has been ingrained into society.
The optimal amount of alcohol is zero, because nutritionally it is completely replaceable with better options, any of the enzyme/relaxation effects are either replaced with no alcohol alternatives or far better done with exercise.
The entire thread has pro alcohol compartmentalized thinking hallmarks of addictive patterns: don't say bad things about the precious, dismiss the risks, trump up by 100x fringe studies of alleged health benefit. It's like reading /r/trees on reddit.
Now will it kill you from a single shot?no. Is alcohol one of the major millennium spanning means of getting people to procreate, a not insignificant aspect of general societal demographic health? Probably.
Modern refrigeration is a blink in the eye of human history, after all.
Regular moderate wine consumption is a strong correlate of comfortable, non-suburban living, particularly in a post-MADD world. Generally speaking, drive less on a daily basis, walk more on a daily basis, have better cardiovascular health and less obesity, live longer. This is a significant EU/US delta.
In the US wine is not the cheapest way to get drunk, nor is it as socially popular in disadvantaged minority groups. The health issues associated with poverty & healthcare/nutrition access are less significant in wine drinkers, and the lifestyle of those statistically drawn to wine as a beverage of choice is correlated with lower stress levels.
These aren't new or novel observations, but when we're talking about very weak effects, even the uncertainty bounds on known confounders start to dominate.
Alcohol is largely normalized as a party element in the US as opposed to just being an extra flavor at the dinner table. IMHO, the culture around drinking is likely what needs to change. Maybe we can shift from the "yes or no" category of the world to the "a sip might be nice to pair with X" model instead.
That's what gets me about all this alcohol discourse, we tried this already. We passed a damn constitutional amendment, then repealed it 13 years later because it was so bad. Something something learning from the past or doomed to repeat it.
Think of how many instances of people getting @^*%-faced drunk with a group of friends is the basis of a large-grossing movie in the US. Now think of how many instances having a sip to drink at dinner with friends is the basis of a similarly grossing movie in the US. We glorify drinking to excess in our media/entertainment as well as so many conversations I have been privy to over the years... mostly my younger years but not exclusively.
Do the same with a cigarette nowadays and most would do a double take.
This is like asking "is a hammer healthy?" Alcohol is a tool. It evolved alongside humans as human social needs changed, like kava in a circle of elders or tobacco in a peace/war pipe, or wormwood left to soak in wine made by Spanish priests as a catchall for ailments.
"No bus usage is healthy", "some social media scrolling is recommended per day", "FDA recommends 1 dose of powersaws" - these kinds of pronouncements fail to understand how alcohol came about.
I would agree though that some studies and their conclusions are garbage. That doesn't mean science cannot be advanced by better studies and experiments.
Many medicinal compounds and molecules are only soluble in ethanol, and so many early medicines resemble amaro decoctions that people still drink recreationally today. These medical uses convergently evolved across cultures and geographies.
Doing business or politics over wine or shochu was useful because alcohol removes social inhibitions that would otherwise hide things in negotiations.
It's also just an important way to preserve calories of harvested fruits and grains that would otherwise spoil, which is why in some places it was used as currency in place of gold.
It does not unless you've learned that it does. There are lots of really old (but still perfectly valid) placebo studies on this.
A hammer that, when you use it on a certain, individual, previously unknown, amount of nails, will nefariously and permanently influence your brain to nudge you to use a hammer more often, even when you would actually need any other kind of tool; that is not a hammer I would recommend anyone to use.
Alcohol has all kinds of complex and negative interactions with people. It makes young people more violent and reckless, for example; it is used to lessen the pain of psychological issues and sadness, to the users detriment; it causes people to say and do things they regret later. Sure, it also loosens you up, which can help some time, but characterising alcohol as a tool is at best a gross mischaracterisation and at worst self deception.
-Jackie Mason
Anyway, I don't care. If I want to have a drink, I will, because I enjoy alcohol. Not always, but sometimes. What does irritate me are the teetotallers. They lost the argument over prohibition, thankfully. But they never went away.
The war on drugs people are losing the same argument.
Plus, there is a lot of incentive to transition self-medicators off of alcohol and nicotine and onto SSRIs, diabetes medication, anti-anxiety meds and more profitable products.
In the end life is full of unknowns. There are people in their 90s who drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney. There are people who led a very healthy lifestyle and died in their 40s. Don't forget to enjoy life while trying to make it last as long as possible.
"Everything in moderation, including moderation." -Oscar Wilde
For vitamin D it'll be more unhealthy to never get sunlight exposure.
When you unnaturally radically alter your diet, physical environment, or lifestyle to an extreme outside of normal human experience based on trying to optimize a single variable in attempt to be healthier, it is almost guaranteed to backfire.
But just for completeness: you can satisfy your vitamin D need through diet, particularly oily fish like sardines and salmon. At least I hope so, because for various scheduling/remote work/family reasons I don't get a lot of daylight these days. I run and bike outside, but generally not during peak daylight hours.
So trying to debate extremes may become a straw man that diffuses useful discussion around alcohol.
Basically any medical advice you get from a headline or even a single study is a lie
After a couple of beers I get extremely fired up and creative/motivated, but it’s like walking on a tightrope - a bit too much, and I’m past the productive phase.
If cannabis or hallucinogens were allowed, I suspect more people would pick those over alcohol for evening fun at home…but, alas, at most places alcohol is the only option. So that’s what we’re stuck with.
Doesn't feel bad, per se. I suppose it just feels kind of neutral, and strange. Like my senses have lost a bit of clarity.
Either way, hardly a reason to make it illegal.
Indeed. Plenty of other good reasons like healthcare costs, increased physical violence, DUIs, neglected families, etc.
I buy 5mg gummies and cut them in half, 2.5mg is plenty for me.
It's way easier for me to stick to moderate use and take breaks with cannabis than it is with alcohol. Dialing in dosages with edibles is a bigger learning curve though because the feedback is so delayed. I prefer smoking for this reason as well as the shorter duration of effects.
I'm using such tiny amounts, it can't be any worse for the lungs than exercising outside in a city full of car exhaust and tire particles. Or so I tell myself, ha.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6461403/
Smoking pot makes me literally curl up into a ball on the floor in panic and anxiety.
Does it though? I did not drink for a while now, but basically, if anything, it just attenuated feelings that felt bad a bit. But it never made me feel good per se.
I am sometimes like you describe, where booze basically just makes me feel kind of slow and loopy but not in a way that is pleasant (kind of reminds me of how benzos felt). If I keep pushing to try and force the good feeling with more drinks I only end up tired and irritable, like when you wake up from a nap feeling all out of sorts.
Other times I start getting a nice pleasant "glow" or buzz going within the first half of a drink and can ride that for hours with steady imbibing. Pain is numbed, body feels lighter (paradoxically, because there is also a certain heaviness with drinking), have an easier time focusing and socializing, stress and anxiety are relieved, etc.
Too bad alcohol is so damn addictive and harmful, the latter effects are quite nice.
Plus: "It is difficult to get [someone] to understand [obesity, chronic heart disease, strokes, arteriosclerosis, climate change, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, deforestation, environmental degradation, pollution, ultraprocessing malnutrition, and soaring food prices] when his [addiction to Big Macs] depends upon his not understanding it."
The definition of this sin became rather expansive over the centuries, so it would also cover those who engage in obsessive anticipation of the things they consume, who spend too much on them, etc. One reason for this was that the gorging of the prosperous may leave the needy hungry.
So from that point of view, it seems to me that the sin of Gluttony is still routinely condemned by people of a Christian culture, even if they are not aware of this ancient framework.
Regarding your specific question, I would say that overeating to the point of causing hunger to others is still criticised. At the same time, assuming that there is enough food to go around, eating too much of it doesn’t cause the same negative externalities to others as drinking too much alcohol.
Now, "temperance" (= "moderation") and "sobriety" (= "seriousness") are commands, but those are both orthogonal to alcohol consumption. Gluttony is likely related though, depending on definition.
Sects generally form (and mutate) in one of three ways:
1. We're facing some real problem, so I should invent something to fix it.
2. There's something I want to do that current traditions disallow, so I'll make my own traditions with blackjack and hookers.
3. I should be the one in charge.
#1 is a good fit here - the problems of excessive alcohol consumption (and human inability to stop after just a little) are well-attested through the ages, even before automobiles expanded the ability to kill others.
That being said, its one of the capital vices and many people focus on the mortal sins first since venial sins can be curbed easier.
There's often discussions about it at Churches, especially during Lent.
There is a value to a social lubricant. People get more passionate, or philosophical. People are less likely to discuss the cost of drywall impacting their bathroom renovation.
Sobriety is merely one state of conciousness, and there is no saying it is solely the best.
This sort of thinking is rather problematic. There's lots of stuff we did for centuries that we now realize is bad for us or are just blatantly wrong.
For most of history, humans were optimizing for calorie shortages. It is only relatively recently, and only in some locations, where food has become consistently abundant.
Not saying you have to do it, but it's part of European cultures for centuries. There is no need to be dismissive of it. My partner is Indian, doesn't drink, and Indian food is no more or less delicious than genuine European food.
I have no problem with people not drinking, just the smugness of those who make it a personality trait.
coffee actually used to be considered as, or more sinful than alcohol when it came to being a social lubricant. (it did not help that coffee houses became known as hotbeds of revolutionary thought in Europe.)
I'm not saying there's a causal relationship here, but I don't think that example works well.
In the aggregate and with better public transportation and mental healthcare maybe it can be a net win for everyone. Yet I have doubts.
I drink cautiously because I know the health risks. I limit myself and most of the time do not drink at all. But I would be lying if I said alcohol doesn’t make me a better person.
And yeah some extremes are bad.
Not biochemically, it doesn't. It slows your reaction time. It doesn't make you do or think anything you otherwise wouldn't, you just get there a little slower.
For all I know, you still become all those great things when you drink, but you might as well said it about taking a smoke. It might be just as true then. It's not the substance doing it.
"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world."
Even for my friends who are still friends, it took them many months to realize it was fine to drink around me and sometimes they still feel awkward about it even though I bring my non-alcoholic alternatives.
> Alcohol is involved in more homicides across the United States compared to other substances, like heroin and cocaine. In fact, about 40% of convicted murderers had used alcohol before or during the crime.
listed among other crimes such as robbery, sexual assault, aggravated assault, intimate partner violence and child abuse[1].
For some people, alcohol is a low-cost low-effort means to enhance experience and improve social function.
Lisa died in 2016 from alcohol withdrawals. Mike was a speed addict for nearly a decade but eventually recovered.
My wife is an alcoholic, unfortunately. She's been in the ICU twice in the time we've been married, both times for acute vitamin deficiency and liver failure. She told me once on the way to the hospital that she saw a tunnel with a light at the end and our cat floating in it inviting her to come. The ER doc said she would probably have died within a day if I hadn't brought her in. When Lisa died, it was because her roommate was out of town and there was nobody to notice, care, and bring her in. When she was found, she's already been dead for three days.
I don't know that I have a point. Just be careful. Not you specifically, but everyone out there. If you're 50 and successfully practiced moderation for decades, I guess you'll probably be fine. But if you're a teenager trying to make your parties more thrilling, you're flipping a coin with your life. You don't know which person you'll end up being, the one who can stop or the one who can't.
Related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752193
It's rather a fact.
Stress is generally bad for the body (but note: I am not a doctor), and a little alcohol can be a social lubricant and reduce the stress of social situations or just your life problems in general. If the only real benefit of alcohol is from social lubrication, then its probably an almost impossible thing to find causation, just too many factors to deal with.
There was a big study on the antioxidant vitamins (A, C, E) to see if they helped against lung cancers. It turned out they made it worse, not better. Cancer cells are under oxidative stress, and immune cells using oxidizing substances to help kill their targets.