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No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

medrxiv.org

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Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#91

Post by c0nducktr »

tristanj wrote: post #88
c0nducktr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know of a way to get this shipped to the USA?

If you're ok with comparable alternatives, Amazon sells a variety of non-alcoholic wines.

That might work, I'm interested in this one specifically because in the article that was added, the person reviewing it said it made them feel tipsy-drunk, but never more than that, which sounds absolutely ideal for me.

I do wonder how much is due to the claimed GABA uptake enhancement from the ingredients and how much of that would be attributed to placebo though.

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#92

Post by kstrauser »

mettamage wrote: post #5
flemhans wrote: post #2

Is there a safer alternative?

Alcohol is drugs such as weed, mdma and heroine. One is more dangerous than the other, but they have one thing in common. Drugs damage the body and/or to some extent in some way, shape or form. Don't do alcohol. If you have social pressure, fake it. Like order a beer and don't actually drink it, pretend to sip. I think people need to take this more seriously and start to think for themselves. I know it's hard, we hav…

That's not realistic. Animals love drugs, from monkeys eating overripe fruits to get drunk to goats eating coffee beans to catch a buzz (and yes, caffeine is just as much a drug as anything else).

Telling adults not to use drugs -- don't come for my coffee mug without an army -- is about as reasonable and effective as telling teens not to have sex. However great you think the reasons might be not to do those things, people are going to do them. We've been doing it for millions of years and aren't likely to stop now.

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#93

Post by Godel_unicode »

brummm wrote: post #71
tryptophan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically the result from this study could be re-stated as "alcohol consumption has no significant influence on grey matter volume"?

No, it was found to have a statistically significant influence on grey matter volume.

Statistically significant just means that the results are correlated at greater than some probability, not that the effect itself is significant.

I.E. you can have a statistically significant but unimportant effect.

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#94

Post by sandworm101 »

driverdan wrote: post #39
dsr_ wrote: post #19

Median alcohol intake was 13.5 units ( 102g) weekly That was among people who drank at all; for reference, that's just under two standard drinks per day, which is apparently what the UK considers the threshold of "low risk".

Two drinks a day, every day of the week is a lot of alcohol.

It is. 14 is well above the median number of drinks for the US population.

https://slate.com/technology/2014/10/how-much-alcohol-do-ame...

One of the rare articles that discusses median consumption rather than mean average.

"The more I thought about these data, the stranger they seemed. My 11-drink-per-week habit corresponds almost exactly to the national average, 556 drinks per year. But according to this chart, that number would be grossly misleading, since it combines the huge number of people who never quaff at all with the much smaller group who drink like it’s their job. (Those in the top decile of consumption swig an incomprehensible average of 74 drinks per week.) When I compare my habit to the median instead of the mean, I find that I’m dosing myself with 10 times more alcohol than the typical American."

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#95

Post by rhodozelia »

kstrauser wrote: post #47

Welp, that does it. I'm definitely not getting smarter, and can't afford to lose what little I'm still holding onto. I live in a US state where weed is legal, and I was discussing this with a friend: it's starting to seem like a terrible idea to drink at all if weed is available and has lesser harmful effects. For me personally, it comes down to that I'd hate for my kids to see me using weed, but I acknowledge that's…

If I have one beer I am generally a lot less impaired then if I were to have the minimum dose of weed

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#96

Post by hesdeadjim »

elliekelly wrote: post #46
hesdeadjim wrote: post #7

Haven’t had a drop in fourteen years after being a weekend binge drinker. I don’t begrudge the substance, but it has been transformative being this far removed from it. The downside? Dear god have I missed the taste of beer. La Croix and other products don’t fill the gap. There has thankfully been an explosion in the NA craft beer scene in the last few years, and some of them are good enough that I’ve had friends who…

When I was in Amsterdam just before Covid I went to the Heineken factory and they gave us samples of their Heineken 0.0 which is brewed entirely without alcohol rather than the usual “non-alcoholic” beer approach of brewing it and then removing the alcohol. It was surprisingly good! Unless you do a side by side comparison of the regular and the 0.0 I doubt you’d ever know. Tangentially related, I wish I could remembe…

Personal preference and all that, but if Heineken 0.0 had been my first NA beer I would have never bought another after. It's why I push so hard on the craft brew brands, they bring real taste.

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#97

Post by hesdeadjim »

robrenaud wrote: post #45
hesdeadjim wrote: post #7

Haven’t had a drop in fourteen years after being a weekend binge drinker. I don’t begrudge the substance, but it has been transformative being this far removed from it. The downside? Dear god have I missed the taste of beer. La Croix and other products don’t fill the gap. There has thankfully been an explosion in the NA craft beer scene in the last few years, and some of them are good enough that I’ve had friends who…

There is still a small amount of alcohol in those n/a beers. Athletic brewing co is amazing though, especially the coffee porter.

Yea, but the alcohol level is on par with a bottle of Kombucha most of the time. You'd have to drink a ten pack to maybe even get the same feeling you'd get from a single 5% beer.

There is perhaps a danger to someone attempting sobriety, from the psychological response to the taste. It'd been twelve years for me when I had my first NA, and I had to take a real hard look at my near-overwhelming OMG YES feeling. Thankfully I just love the taste and am not secretly wishing for a real one.

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#98

Post by hesdeadjim »

mritchie712 wrote: post #51
hesdeadjim wrote: post #7

Haven’t had a drop in fourteen years after being a weekend binge drinker. I don’t begrudge the substance, but it has been transformative being this far removed from it. The downside? Dear god have I missed the taste of beer. La Croix and other products don’t fill the gap. There has thankfully been an explosion in the NA craft beer scene in the last few years, and some of them are good enough that I’ve had friends who…

Same here, quitting changed my life. I started https://stopping.app/ to make it easier to quit

That's great. I think there is opportunity to create a white-brand business providing similar functionality to treatment centers and IOPs. Happy to talk about it if you like, I have quite a large network in that industry and advise a small IOP that would probably be willing to test something like that.

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#99

Post by jeeeb »

michaericalribo wrote: post #65
thnujmikk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study doesn't infer causality. It could just be that people who drink happen to belong to the same class of people who lose 0.8% of grey matter.

This is true, however, the sample size is quite large, they controlled for confounders, and they address the possibility that this is all a coincidence: > Whilst we controlled analyses for all known confounders and were more thorough in this than any previously published study, we cannot exclude the possible of residual confounding. However, the sensitivity analyses estimated that unobserved confounding would need to…

Controlling for confounders and demonstrating causality are different things though. They explicitly acknowledge that they don’t demonstrate causality as a study weakness.

People who drink alcohol may simply tend to have a slightly different brain structure.

In this regard it would be more interesting to see a large scale longitudinal study demonstrating an effect in the same individual over time.

Combined with population level studies and a demonstrated mechanism, I think that would be fairly definitive.

Re: No safe level of alcohol for brain health: observational cohort study [pdf]

#100

Post by just-ok »

dsr_ wrote: post #77
just-ok wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Glasses were converted to UK units as follows: red or white wine = 1.7 units; fortified wine=1.2 units; pint = 2.4 units; spirits = 1 unit; other (e.g. alcopops) = 1.2 units. Amounts were also converted to grams pure ethanol (1 UK unit=8g) to aid international comprehension and comparison. Can someone explain these numbers to me? They claim to measure one “standard drink” (all of which are equal), yet each variant…

They are multiplying the size of a wine glass by the ABV of red wine, the size of a shot glass by the ABV of vodka, the size of a pint glass by the ABV of beer... it's all estimation, but it's what they've got.

But you just defined what a "standard drink" is, no? All of those values are supposed to be equal:

5oz of wine * 12% = 1.5oz of spirits * 40% = 12oz of beer * 5%

so I'm still confused...

Edit: Wait, do you mean the size of a full glass? That's... an odd way to measure things.

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