So how sober has a simple answer if you care about your health : fully sober.
The way I see it / choose to live my life, not that it’s the “right” way: I enjoy certain things, like wine, in moderation that may have some detrimental health effects. However, a glass of wine and a nice sunset is something that brings me a lot of joy. I’d argue that a certain degree of “ah, fuck it” is psychologically healthy which can improve overall health.
I also have a bourbon and cigar on Sunday nights, usually paired some Jazz or an old movie. Sometimes I put butter on my bread even though it’s “bad” for my arteries. Let the chips fall where they may.
Thanks for sharing.
I also see a lot of over indexing on minutia. For example, worrying about drinking a couple glasses of wine, but then never exercising and sitting at a desk for 18 hours/day.
There's also the mental health aspect that you spoke about.
If you care ONLY about your health
I have a watch that measures HRV and have seen nothing that seems a signal linked to behavior.
A doctor told me that ~10% of people who drink become alcoholics.
That's too prevalent to say we " generally seem to handle it just fine"
It is perfectly valid to say “I’ve seen bad stuff with alcohol and chosen to not partake”, and it is also kind of deeply weird to say “I don’t engage in anything with a <90% success rate” and then not give any other examples.
My parent's formulation can be used with other drugs in cases that are still reasonable. For example:
1. Many smokers I know have lived to old age.
2. Therefore "I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands" not smoking cigarettes.
Alcohol abuse is can have a negative impact quality of life as well as the length of the life (this comes from mental and physical health effects). So you could live a very long life with alcohol induced depression/anxiety/diabetes etc.
The last part definitely applies as well to your own statement that we generally seem to handle it just fine. It's interesting to see what happens to communities who don't have thousands of years of history with alcohol when it's introduced. For example the Native American population, or the coloured population of south africa.
Europeans and other groups who have had much longer exposure to alcohol do seem to handle it better, but possibly just because the people who couldn't handle it were selected out of our respective gene pools. But, even then, not really. There's a very good documentary about drinking in the UK called Drinkers Like Me, that really shows the hidden cost of alcohol on the health of people in the UK [0].
There are many other things we've done okay with for long periods of time, like lead plumbing (which we used for about 2 thousand years!), which definitely had long term negative effects on us.
Survivors that do not drink: Valid, unbiased, should be counted
Like the survivors weren't the kinds of people who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, were drunk most nights in their 40s, nor weighed 350 pounds for a majority of their lives... so they weren't doing the obviously very unhealthy things.
But at the same time they weren't health fad people.
People that declare themselves immune to death because they avoid [x substance] can have some insane ideas about diet, exercise, sleep, stress and [y substance]. Believing that the world is simple and controllable is a dangerous intoxicant.
I recall reading an NYT article about the relative health risk of various drinking levels. It seems that light drinking does not have much of an effect on longevity:
> For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average [1]
Could it reduce quality of living without reducing lifespan? I suppose. But I had been led to believe, by many news articles, that drinking even one drink a week was going to do me lots of harm.
My takeaway from this is that news outlets like to get clicks by telling people surprising and terrible things.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...