Shedding light on alcohol's long shadow
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
(I don't know about 90 days but there's pretty extensive studies on how paternal alcohol use can affect fertility, motility, and behavioral outcomes including downstream of possible epigenetic shifts. That said I think you're probably pretty safe to ply the missus with a glass of wine before Adult Time)
I don't know much about cropping for beer production tbh, but I've lived in a couple of places where vineyards are popular, and the world could really do without them. Maybe they'd be worthwhile if they produced grapes to eat.
It must depend on the country, but generally anything below 1% is considered OK (so 0.8% is marketable as 0%)
Also alcohol labeling has a small wiggle room but .8 bring zero is incorrect. If it's labeled at 5%. The manufacturer can legally sell it at a .3% wiggle so 4.7% to 5.3%.
I quickly discovered that even a little (3oz of whiskey (2 shots)) would measurably and negatively affect my next day's workout. Usually just performance, but sometimes up to the point of actually making me nauseous during the workout.
Prior to getting into a running/workout routine, I was no lightweight, I could easily down ~10oz whiskey and have room for more.
I feel substantially better and more consistently better without alcohol.
I've tried alcohol a few times since and everytime I regret it the next day.
I too noticed a sizable difference in my mood, cognition, and general well being. I exercise daily and any day I drink even a single beer now affects me the next day, so I largely avoid it. Best life change I ever made!
I wonder if all these reports of various changes for the better after stopping drinking (moderately, of course, not talking about people with alcoholism problems) are just placebo effect or it's that people's bodies work differently and for some people a few beers or wines a week may be a big deal whereas others are unaffected.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of the problem; some families I know consider a glass or two of wine with every dinner to be "moderate". Every Saturday and Sunday involves at least two bottles of wine each of those days, and it's called "moderate".
If they stopped their current habits I would not be surprised to hear that they saw a marked improvement in their health metrics.
I call myself "moderate", and have maybe two or three drinks per year, and never more than a single drink per occasion. I would not expect to see any improvement in my health metrics by cutting that out.
I obsessively track everything I can, what I eat (https://cronometer.com/), how I sleep (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/autosleep-track-sleep-on-watch...), my exercise stats (apple fitness/health).
Nights that I have alcohol can easily be seen in my sleep tracker (I fall asleep easily, but then have a very disrupted night of sleep). In my food tracker (Excessive carb intake). And in the fitness tracker (higher average heart-rate with lower distance/weight)
Improved circulation?
Those four weeks are Christmas, Easter, Summer hols, and another holiday week.
If asian grocery stores are a thing in your area the nonalcoholic Japanese plum wine (umeshu) drinks are super delicious
What's great is that I absolutely resent the taste and smell of alcoholic drinks now. I've tried on a couple of occassions to drink a beer and couldn't even get through a single sip.
As for flying in IMC, modern avionics makes that stuff much easier. Getting an instrument rating has become more of an effort in mastering procedural complexity than any relevant flying skill. I did my rating almost 40 years ago. It took a different mind-set with basic steam-punk instruments.
Nephew got his rating about three years ago and has about 700 hours, with about 150 on the gauges, but all done with the modern stuff that does the situational awareness thinking for you. We were shooting an RNAV in the soup last winter in my old bird with mostly old stuff in the panel. He never got stabilized and I had to take the bird and took a missed approach.
His comment was that it should be illegal to fly in IMC with that "old shit". Whatever. Never bothered me any. And I have a few beers per week, but never within 48h of screeching "clear prop".
I'll tell what should be illegal: my wife's pork tacos without beer.
Like everything, moderation is key. It’s incredible to me that the internet has become so negative on alcohol and so cavalier about marijuana. The latter is far worse for me in terms of productivity decrease and hangovers than alcohol. YMMV but the nuance and individual body results are heavily skewed in 2024
I don't really think anyone has to "demonize" the stuff, some people really pickle their brains in it, and then die
[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/25-06-2024-over-3-million-annu...
I remember one guy who drank a single light beer when we were hanging out watching the superbowl after he had already been told by the doctor not to drink anything from going hard in his younger days, and the next morning I got to take the day off work to bring him to the hospital to have his esophogas stapled up.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article-abstract/44/5/529/18...
I don't drink at all, so I'm pretty sensitive to the effects of alcohol. I can't detect them at all after drinking kvass. I could feel them after drinking a home-made and even some store-bought kombucha.
> There's speculation that letting kids drink the stuff has been a contributor to heavy alcoholism in the former soviet union
I doubt it. Other countries also have a tradition of fermented drinks, often based on milk, that are just as alcoholic.
I don't see this push, but I would not be surprised if I did.
If alcohol were only invented today, there isn't a single civilised country in the world that would legalise it. The reason it is legal right now is because it was grandfathered into law because humans have had alcohol since before we had writing!
The victim-count of alcohol dwarves everything else, even smoking when smoking popularity was at its peak; why are you surprised to see a push to demonise it?
I have several friends who smoke daily, and it shows. It really does, they are s l o w. Tell them, and they get super defensive.
Thankfully for me, I've never been a heavy drinker, maybe having 1 or 2 beers in a period of a week or two, at most. I don't really hang out with heavy drinkers, so it surprised me when friends would mention they were drinking several alcoholic beverages a night regularly. I suppose it changed how I viewed discussions of people getting off alcohol. They've got a bigger hurdle to get over to stop drinking that much and would definitely see a big change on their health and their budget. If I stopped having it at all, I probably would not notice a difference.
To me it's a problem if you can't stop when you want to or feel cravings when you do. Like I said I'll have a bourbon or two occasionally but I also go weeks sometimes without drinking at all. Sometimes, around the holidays especially or when a group of friends gets together I'll drink more. This seems pretty normal to me.
Single pilot IFR being fun or scary mostly comes down to currency!
I suspect you mean proficiency. If you’re not current you’re not legal.
I find discussion of tiny marginal risks to be somewhat neurotic when there are so many real risks ( or passions) people could focus their attention on.