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Comment by Schiendelman | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying that defining half of 7-14 (or 3.5.7) drinks per week as heavy seems insane to you?

Current science proposes that even 2 drinks a week significantly increases cancer rate, and is the current suggested limit for health - I suspect it would be lower but for reactions like you're having. It seems likely that double or triple that is indeed unsafe.

Media is very careful not to shame their readers: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alcohol-cancer-risk-what-to-kno...

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According to the CDC, NIH and other respected credible, mostly objective federal health research groups have all suggested up to 2 drinks per day for men and 1 drink for women is not only safe but also beneficial, citing that moderate drinking "reduced risk of heart attack, atherosclerosis, and certain types of strokes". Obviously this would not be the case for people prone to alcoholism or some other complications or contraindications. Sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6761695/

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcoh...

More recent research has come out pretty much destroying the claim that moderate drinking "reduced risk of heart attack, atherosclerosis, and certain types of strokes". So CDC, NIH suggestions are outdated and they'll probably update it in a year or two (hopefully lol).

It's political, people react strongly to it so they can't. But the studies they used have all been shown to be nonsense. What's surprising to me is to see the gp comment when the original post is specifically addressing the data used to back the claim.

Yeesh - that has all been completely debunked, and largely addressed by the original post. The link in the comment you replied to addresses your claim specifically, as does this: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Wellness/new-research-shows-moder...

> Are you saying that defining half of 7-14 (or 3.5.7) drinks per week as heavy seems insane to you?

Yes. I assert that drinking 3½–7 drinks a week sounds moderate. One or two drinks a week is light. Heavy drinking would be something like 24 or more.

I define the heaviness of drinking by intoxication, not cancer risk.

Ah, all the definitions of heavy in this comment section other than yours seem to be about health, so I think you may have moved the goalposts there.

The original quote in the article was about alcoholism: "That is a recipe for alcoholism."

I think maybe you moved the goalposts here.

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