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Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

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Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#31

Post by carbocation »

roel_v wrote: post #28
carbocation wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Observational studies can be incredibly hard to do in a way where you can infer causality. But most of the data you can get your hands on are observational. Does cataract surgery reduce mortality in older women? It sure looked like it, until it was recognized that the study suffered from a concept called "immortal time bias" [1]. Now the reverse "seems" to be true. (Unhelpfully, it's easy to make an "explanation" for…

Is 'immortal time bias' not 'survivorship bias'?

Yes, these are the same concepts. As is often the case, slightly different terminology across fields. But no difference in the main idea.

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#32

Post by sytelus »

Glass of wine in the night is a very bad habit and you don't need a large scale study to prove it. If you have a watch that can track your sleep cycle, you will see that your deep sleep doesn't start until much later if you consuming alcohol before going to sleep. In other words, a glass of wine might make you feel relaxed but it robes you from your deep sleep.

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#33

Post by beefman »

carbocation wrote: post #7

1. The best evidence that there is no safe amount of alcohol consumption is the Mendelian randomization (MR) by Holmes et al from 2014 [1]. I believe that the more recent paper making such claims is no better than the usual observational studies. But the MR paper is convincing to me. The risks for mild drinking appear to be low enough that I don't abstain, and I am happy to tell my patients about my thought process.…

The first paper is about blood lipids and CHD and doesn't seem to mention alcohol. Did you post the wrong link?

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#34

Post by seandougall »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #24

That page was nearly unreadable in Chrome on my phone due to bizarre scrolling ads everywhere and eventually crashed and died. A pity, I was learning a lot.

Same on mobile Safari. On page load it immediately scrolled halfway down the article and covered up half the screen with a “trending articles” popover whose assets — including the dismiss button — failed to load.

Seriously, does anybody in publishing actually visit their own sites? I see UX like this and all I can think is, “gee, somebody got _paid_ to make this?”

Edit: I see from another comment that the scrolling was (partly) a result of the link being to an anchor tag. I stand by the rest of my point, though.

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#35

Post by carbocation »

beefman wrote: post #33
carbocation wrote: post #7

1. The best evidence that there is no safe amount of alcohol consumption is the Mendelian randomization (MR) by Holmes et al from 2014 [1]. I believe that the more recent paper making such claims is no better than the usual observational studies. But the MR paper is convincing to me. The risks for mild drinking appear to be low enough that I don't abstain, and I am happy to tell my patients about my thought process.…

The first paper is about blood lipids and CHD and doesn't seem to mention alcohol. Did you post the wrong link?

Whoops, yes. Correcting it now. Thank you. Also updated 2015 to 2014.

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#36

Post by skybrian »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #17
_null_ wrote: post #8

I have been reading for years about the numbers of studies being done (especially in the public health field) that can be whittled down to correlation without any strongly proven causality. Is this an issue with science, or with how the media reports on science? Is it really as bad as it seems? I understand that it's difficult to control for various factors when doing large scale studies of health and behavior, but m…

>correlation without any strongly proven causality How would one really prove causality or does it even matter. When I think of science, I try to think of it like how I think of physics, where we create a model that best describes the evidence but which doesn't have any guarantee of being how things really work. Take Newtonian gravity. It is a pretty good model that describes a lot of basic interactions. Given a stat…

It matters for decision-making. If A causes B then forcing A to happen artificially (without changing anything else) will make B happen too. If it's not a cause then it won't. The correlation might always happen in the original environment, but it doesn't survive intervention.

This does matter in physics too.

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#37

Post by mindfulplay »

Why is it that hard to do actual research? Like science? Observe what alcohol does to the body and identify risks. I know this is hard.

Lazy survey door to door salespeople posing as scientists dominate this field unfortunately.

This is not science. This is guesswork. And this causes serious problems to people who trust this crap.

Throw away your shitty biased studies and start doing actual science.

It took Newton a lot of time to observe and repeat and prove the physics of gravity. And that stood the test of time for several decades at least.

This shitty research area needs to stop. People post media coverage as somehow being the final validators of their crappy research.

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#38

Post by pcmaffey »

jMyles wrote: post #23
thrownaway954 wrote: post #18

because more people are becoming alcoholics and the penalties for a DWI are getting harsher. bottom line is... if you think you have a problem, you already have a problem. Get help and get help now before you hurt someone (you don't want this on your conscience... trust me). Go to AA, NA, a therapist, a doctor, rehab, a detox, doesn't matter, open up and tell someone you have a problem and get the help you need befor…

> because more people are becoming alcoholics Do you have a source for this claim, which both does a good job of defining a measurement schema for alcoholism and also shows convincingly that it is on the incline? Do you also have a source for the claim that this particular increase is the reason (or even a contributing factor) to the apparent decline in correlation between moderate wine consumption and positive healt…

"Is it a problem?" is always relative. The question would be better phrased, "is it a problem worthy of expending limited resources on fixing?" with the usual considerations of opportunity costs, etc.

So yes thinking about whether something is a problem worth addressing is totally healthy behavior for anyone with a modicum of self-awareness.

Re: Remember when a glass of wine a day was good for you?

#39

Post by joshgel »

_null_ wrote: post #8

I have been reading for years about the numbers of studies being done (especially in the public health field) that can be whittled down to correlation without any strongly proven causality. Is this an issue with science, or with how the media reports on science? Is it really as bad as it seems? I understand that it's difficult to control for various factors when doing large scale studies of health and behavior, but m…

> I understand that it's difficult to control for various factors when doing large scale studies of health and behavior, but my perception as a layman is that there is some willful ignorance or absence of rigor.

I perhaps understand the sentiment behind this, but if this is really what you think then probably you don't really 'understand' how difficult it is to do large scale studies of health and behavior. As a thought experiment, pretend you are the researcher studying a glass of wine a night and write the script you would pitch to potential research subjects. You have to try to convince them to be randomized to either completely abstain from alcohol for a period of 10-20 years OR to drink 1 glass of wine a night for that same period. Do you think you could get 10,000-50,000 people to participate and that those people would reliably stick to their randomized groups? How would you monitor compliance? How will you keep track of those people for 30-50 years to see differences in mortality or other outcomes?

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