Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Cancers linked to alcohol use:
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-...
The American Cancer Society recommends avoiding alcohol consumption at any level.
One stereotype I’ve heard is that people quit drinking and then become addicted to coffee. Coffee apparently can have acetaldehyde in it.
I wonder more about soluble fiber carbohydrates leading to ethanol production in the gut.
It also could be the ritual of the whole thing. I quit drinking, and got really into coffee drinks. Creating potions—the anticipation, the combination of fluids with different densities and colors, the foam that is produced by espresso when the pressure is just right—it is all kind of satisfying.
can you use acetaldehyde to crosslink proteins and polysaccharides to make thermosetting bioplastics? apparently you can use it to crosslink urea, just as you can with formaldehyde
looks like the answer is yes, at least if the polysaccharide is chitosan: https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/7/1/10
there isn't enough acetaldehyde in bread and fresh fruit or alcoholics' livers to be a practical source for this purpose, but one traditional acetaldehyde process was catalytic dehydrogenation of ethanol on a copper-based catalyst at 260°–290°, which seems like the kind of thing that john plant might feature on the next episode of primitive technology
This is nonsense advice. Would you take the advice of someone who recommended never driving because any level of driving risks death? That's obviously stupid. Or it should be anyway though I suspect some pendants will try to argue it. If you're one of those people what about never going outside? The sun's deadly rays might give you cancer and there's no safe level of sunlight!!
Risks are about trade-offs. If the American Cancer Society wants to be helpful and actually listened to they need to provide practical actionable advice, not this cop-out.
No cigarettes either. But it's OK to go camping and live in a cloud of smoke for days. I wonder how many cigarettes a day equals being in a big campground with fires everywhere for 2 days is?
https://woods.stanford.edu/news/health-impacts-wildfire-smok....
Air filtration works very well for smoke (and other particulates).
Obviously we are talking about physical addiction, not some cultural nonsense.
And you're right, risks are all about trade-offs and how you implement that advice into your own life is entirely up to you. Crucially, they're not making recommendations to make anyone feel better about their harmful decisions, they're making them to help people make informed decisions.
Also if I go drinking with someone I don't know well, the risk of their becoming violent is quite high.
Alcohol happens to have 10,000 years of cultural tradition behind it. Plus, it pairs well with food.
In what kind of society or social circles is this true? Here it's common to socialize and meet strangers over a drink or two, and the risks of their becoming violent is near zero.
Maybe but it's also much harder to obtain due to being illegal.
> the risk of their becoming violent is quite high.
Jesus who are you going drinking with??? That's not normal.
> On average, roughly 100% of inmates who are incarcerated for violent offences have two arms.
Arghhh! Quick, cut one of everyone's arms off!
Like someone here writes, correlation does not imply causation, but correlation is evidence of causation, and that is a strong correlation. Specifically, if the person you picked is under the influence, he or she is 10.4 times more likely to be engaging in an act of violence than if he or she is not.
"Randomized placebo-controlled study of the benefits of personal mobility", Stravro and Chunk, 1999.
Have those made-up sources included externalities, from air and noise pollution, to city planning, commutes, lifestyle changes - include pressure and stress added to the individual by the extra speed of going places?
Have they asked those pesky "walk and/or take the public transport" Europeans living in suitable cities, if they prefer their way?
I feel like the medical community is slowly starting to finally realize that they can't force patients to minmax their lives. Why would I live a long life that isn't enjoyable?
I mean, they are very different, unless you have the will of a wet noodle.
When the ACS recommends avoiding alcohol consumption at any level, they don't think people are actually going to suddenly quit drinking. They're just trying to convince that guy who drinks two six-packs a night to cut down to one six-pack a night.
A friend of mine wouldn’t eat non-organic blueberries because he heard they suck up tons of pesticides so ate more eggs and sausage instead for breakfast.
Is the magnitude of health benefit of going from 2 drinks a day to 1 drink a day equivalent to or 1/20th the benefit of an average American walking an additional 20 minutes per day?
I don’t have the source with me now but I read that in my example above, it would save about 650 lives a year compared to 175k+ due to overall alcohol use.
> The best way to assess the effects of alcohol would be to randomly assign people to drink it or not in childhood and then monitor their health and drinking over the rest of their lives. Since such studies cannot be done, researchers instead have to ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over much shorter periods of time.
Studying humans properly is nigh-on impossible.
Say you do the setup from the quote, then one group would also be in a special situation where researchers told them to do this thing, and they would tell their friends, or maybe they would keep it secret, or maybe it would make them a bit weird, or maybe it would pave the way for more addictions, or make them more conscious of it, and they would have another item on their usual shopping list, and they may meet their spouse in a bar, and so on — all of which influences outcome.
a) you break a number of laws and ethical rules
and b) you have a population of hundreds of billions of humans to study. Humans are very different from one another in important but subtle ways.
See Nazi twin studies, Japanese Unit 731, and who knows what is going on right now which will take years to be uncovered..
This is why I find the proclamation that "correlation != causation" so annoying. Of course it doesn't, but we cannot make a causative study of humans!
Decades of studies rationalizing that "actually, people who drink two glasses of wine a day live longer" and their ilk, have only ever distracted from this simple truth, obviously so hard to contradict by first principles.
Some of it works due to hormetic effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
With alcohol, we don't really have a dose, like we do with eg vitamin A, which is toxic beyond a certain level. And as the article states, there are social benefits with drinking alcohol which could, if the dose of alcohol is low enough, offset the cost-benefit analysis of drinking.
> But he points out that it doesn’t consider the social aspects of moderate drinking. “It is healthier to socialise without the need for alcohol, but the benefits of spending time with others is still likely to be greater than the risk from the consumption of one to two units of alcohol,” he says. “The challenge being perhaps limiting alcohol intake in this way.”
And socialising is one of the controllable variables that can reduce the risk of dementia: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30367-6/full...
But also: excessive alcohol is a controllable variable that can increase the risk of dementia! https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30367-6/full...
It's a complicated balance.
How can you get more suitable than that, when it comes to studying the phenomenon in its natural environment ;)
I guess it can be a tough crowd when some of the subjects have been exposed to the test material much more indulgently than others.
The results could come out garbled, and you could be hammered - - by indecision :)
for coffee it's probably very similar
we say "the dose makes the poison" but it doesn't change that regularly drinking a low dose of poison is not good.
It also correlates with serial killers, because turns out no one likes to do their hobby in poor weather.
As an example for coffee consumption it could just be that coffee is consumed more in countries with higher living standards and higher living standards lead to longer life. Coffee might not necessarily be healthy by itself, though of course it could very well be.
People who don't have access to Healthcare don't have the luxury of things like coffee, I bet that shows in the data.
Lots of people have drunk themselves to death.
I've never heard of anyone who was otherwise healthy coffee-ing themselves to death through regular consumption.
(There are rare conditions that make caffeine fatal, but I'm talking about the general population.)
I'm not sure that's the right conclusion there. Vitamin A is a poison, because it's toxic in high doses. But that doesn't mean you should avoid vitamin A.
The expression means that a poison cannot be defined independently of its dose. You need to know the chemical and the amount.
I'm reasonably sure that regular drinking of water at non-toxic doses is good though.
So it really does depend.
Still, facing one's fears and going sober to anxiety inducing situations is absolutely much better long-term treatment of social anxiety. That has a lasting effect, alcohol doesn't.
Although I mean, isn't that the point? If your social anxiety was inhibiting you from eg going to a social event, asking someone out, or speaking in front of a lot of people, wouldn't alcohol reducing your inhibitions be a good thing?
It’s pretty well understood, clinically speaking.
But it’s fun to down a few and the statisical chances of dying sooner are not that high if you follow the generally recommended limits.
Hard agree on their being a myriad of confounding factors from genetics over climate and family relationships to diet, though...
Getting off-topic at this point I guess, but I think national bans can go both ways (and everything in between). I suppose (alcohol) Prohibition and the War on Drugs in the US are prominent examples, but I don't think such bans are doomed to fail necessarily — especially if they are tied with genuine cultural or religious beliefs, geographic isolation, pragmatic unavailability or the thing being banned being simple "not in fashion",,
Mormons do seem to skew toward abstinence from a lot of unhealthy habits, but the stereotype is that they drink a lot of soda, right? That’s bound to do something.
Plus if a group has a strong stigma against alcohol you’ll probably get some members with an unusually high incentive to miss-report whether or not they drink.
As a former member of such a group, this is exactly right. Even if it's completely anonymous, there's a strong and absurd sense of "God is watching me fill out this form, better make myself look good".
"Tim Stockwell has been up to his old tricks. In a study that was widely publicised this week despite being published in January, he claims - yet again - that moderate drinking does not confer health benefits. The study is largely a rehash of his meta-analysis from last year (which I wrote about here) so there isn’t much more to say except to note the extraordinary amount of cherry-picking that is required to come to such a conclusion.
He and his team started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which they added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. They then discarded 103 of these because they didn’t meet Stockwell’s increasingly stringent and somewhat arbitrary criteria. This left 107 studies, but there was still work to do.
In the new study, he introduces yet another filter for “quality” and reduces the number of studies down from 21 to 18 and then 15, but these still show lower risk for moderate drinkers, so he introduces some more criteria until a vast literature built up over 50 years is whittled down to just six studies. This gets rid of the apparent benefits of moderate drinking. He then removes one more study and, voila!, moderate drinkers are now at greater risk than teetotallers."
https://snowdon.substack.com/p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-o...
> qoute
the " are difficult to notice.]
>>“The idea [alcohol has benefits] has impacted national drinking guidelines, estimates of alcohol’s burden of disease worldwide and has been an impediment to effective policymaking on alcohol and public health,” he added.
That doesn't sound like he's "admitting to" what your linked article says he's admitting to.
Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, trying to debunk this Stockwell guy's work, only to make oneself look unreliable with such claims.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
I also strongly suspect that a bit overweight being the best is the same thing at work.
I've personally had nights out with and without alcohol that were just as much fun. I'm also very much a homebody though, so I'm not a great sample to really say either way.
Candy, entertainment, police, governments, even shelter. They're all great things as long as you want them but don't need them.
Like, the positive effects that their success in baseball has on the Dominican Republic would likely also be there if they would commit that hard to basketball, or chess (and maybe that would come with less knee injuries). Yet, it's still correct to say that baseball is hugely beneficial to the DomRep.
My larger point being that we have to disentangle "what should you do on your evenings" and "what is a good cultural approach to this issue"
Those are actually one in the same for me, or at least two parts of the same answer. People should spend their evenings however they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.
I'd be very concerned with any cultural approach to changing behavior, basically "Nudge" with a different name. Culture should be the byproduct of the collective people, a retrospective understanding of what the people already are. Culture shouldn't be a tool for manipulation in my opinion.
If I wanted to go out at night in my city, and go somewhere that wasn't centered around booze I'd be going home around 8 or 9PM since nothing PG-13 is open late.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/substances-risk-factor-vs...
Drinking occasionally can be ’fun’ and it can have social benefits but in large scale studies of populations increase in alcohol usage don’t show ”mental health benefits”.
I would state ’studies have not found quantifiable benefits of alchol use’ and that can still coexist with claims that the benefits of alcohol to yourself are not quantifiable - which is sort of fair, many aspects of human life are beyond reach of clear metrics.
The adverse effects, however, are quite quantitifiable by healthcare statistics. While outcomes vary in different populations, the outcomes are never positive (per current resarch).
”I find a few drinks per week with friends enjoyable” is not a claim that would be in contest with the above. It’s just not a population argument.
Some people like it, some can sustain a lifetime of boozing, but there is a non-trivial amount of people who develop depression or alcoholism - and this is not a flaw of character or culture but simply a fact of interaction of alcohol with human biology and neurology.
I know that my "principled" refusal to drink in my younger years made socializing a lot harder and just generally put a barrier between myself and my peers. Of course, a stronger person could overcome those challenges without alcohol, but that seems like a Herculean task for someone who's already shy and lacking self-esteem.
I guess I just don't see it as black and white.
But here's research since you asked: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9966200/
It's really not surprising, we know fermented foods are good for the microbiome.
Society wise, alcohol is the the direct cause, or a major factor in heart disease, cancer, suicide, gun deaths, car deaths and injuries, etc.