Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
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Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#2Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily). If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all.
I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#3Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
The reported BMJ study does not recommend teetotalers take up drinking; it only suggests moderation for individuals who already consume alcohol.
"We observed a relatively small difference in life expectancies across different levels of alcohol consumption compared with other individual lifestyle factors. The cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have been consistently observed in large cohort studies, but alcohol consumption and risk of cancer showed a dose-response relation. Thus, current guidelines do not encourage a non-alcohol drinker to start drinking just for the benefit of preventing cardiovascular disease."
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#4Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
The reported BMJ study does not recommend teetotalers take up drinking; it only suggests moderation for individuals who already consume alcohol. "We observed a relatively small difference in life expectancies across different levels of alcohol consumption compared with other individual lifestyle factors. The cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have been consistently observed in large cohort studie…
My mistake, I should have been more precise in my formulations. I was rather surprised that daily alcohol consumption still counted as moderate.
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reported BMJ study does not recommend teetotalers take up drinking; it only suggests moderation for individuals who already consume alcohol. "We observed a relatively small difference in life expectancies across different levels of alcohol consumption compared with other individual lifestyle factors. The cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have been consistently observed in large cohort studie…
My mistake, I should have been more precise in my formulations. I was rather surprised that daily alcohol consumption still counted as moderate .
This seems to be a cultural UK/US difference which I've noticed moving to the US. In the UK a glass of wine with food every night would be seen as part of a healthy mediterranean diet and health advice on alcohol was refocussed to discourage binge drinking, emphasizing daily rather than weekly consumption limits.
In the US daily drinking seems to be seen as bad (perhaps a legacy of prohibition?) while binge drinking once a week doesn't seem to be seen as particularly problematic.
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reported BMJ study does not recommend teetotalers take up drinking; it only suggests moderation for individuals who already consume alcohol. "We observed a relatively small difference in life expectancies across different levels of alcohol consumption compared with other individual lifestyle factors. The cardiovascular benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have been consistently observed in large cohort studie…
My mistake, I should have been more precise in my formulations. I was rather surprised that daily alcohol consumption still counted as moderate .
They are not recommending that you drink 4 drinks every day, but right now guidelines come in two forms:
1. Drinks per week, eg 14 drinks/week
2. Average drinks per day, eg 4 drinks/day
If you drink your entire drinks per week in a day, that's really bad. If you drink your average drinks per day, every day, that's also bad.
For others who might be reading this: You should have some days (ideally a majority) in which you don't drink at all, some days in which you drink at or below the daily guideline, and you probably aren't all the worse off if you occasionally exceed the daily average guideline.
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#7Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
Not only that, but these articles always say the "what" and not the "why". Daily consumption of alcohol for example, depletes glutathione. The more you drink, the more that is depleted. Once your reserves are gone, the liver will still protect you, at the cost of itself. It essentially slowly self destructs to neutralize the alcohol once the glutathione is gone. People will always give examples of someone they knew that lived to 100 and had a shot of whiskey every day. Makes sense, they were replenishing their glutathione reserves faster than depleting it. It's obviously much more complicated of a process than what I described, but people don't have a way to measure it. The liver will try to detox people until it hits something like 5% capacity and then the symptoms are really obvious. By then, it is too late.
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#8Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
Also have to factor in the opportunity cost of drinking...going for a drink after work instead of the gym? What comes next? Bar food with your beer and maybe a pizza?
I'd rather have the work out, good meal, hydrate, and get good sleep. It's obvious that good habits snowball into more good habits, while bad habits snowball into more bad habits.
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#9Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
I'm surprised this was mentioned at all. There's even newer research that basically shows any amount of alcohol regularly is bad for you.
Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals
#10Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.
Quite surprising for me too. Or rather, I don't understand the unit they mention. From the article linked:
also collected alcoholic beverage consumption, including red and white wine separately (4 ounces, increasing to 5 ounces in 2006), beer (one glass, can, or bottle), and liquor (one drink or shot). We multiplied the amount of alcohol in grams per specified portion size by servings per day, determined the midpoint of the frequency category, and summed across all beverages to estimate the average alcohol consumption (g/day). We defined moderate alcohol consumption as 5-15 g/day for women and 5-30 g/day for men
Surely it cannot be 4 bottles of beer daily (or 4*7 bottles on weekend).