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Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

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Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#131

Post by cortic »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #125
cortic wrote: post #123

The abundance of pseudo scientific studies that; Confuse correlation with causation. Fail to control for anything to get an interesting conclusion. Or just exaggerate the results. Has left me to instinctively assume, just from the title that either; Cancer causes alcohol use. Alcohol use causes smoking. Or their sampling groups is in a cancer ward. I'm not saying this is a bad study, or article. I'm just commenting o…

Causation, from the article: > Ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage. > Alcohol can also increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Hormones signal cells to grow and divide. With more cell division, there are more opportunities for cancer to develop. Alco…

Thanks. But I think you missed my point, and my second paragraph. But if you think there is an overabundance of accuracy in scientific reporting then perhaps we frequent different places.

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#132

Post by lm28469 »

op00to wrote: post #124
shoto_io wrote: post #115

Many of my friends doubled down on their alcohol use during the pandemic. This might be another side effect of lockdowns that will kill people and simply be ignored by decision makers.

Funny. I stopped drinking altogether during the pandemic. It was too hard to get alcohol in the early months, and I just stopped drinking. Pre pandemic my wife and I would have a beer or glass of wine every night, maybe another one while cooking. Always when out with friends. Now, I may only have 2-3 drinks a month. Our drinking wasn’t problematic but I absolutely notice improvements in my health - I don’t feel like…

Same here, and starting to go out again made it painfully obvious that a lot of what people call "night life" is actually getting (mildly to heavily) impaired to enjoy activities that aren't enjoyable without the impairment

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#133

Post by lm28469 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #9

Correlation =/= Causation Since we mostly don't really understand what cancer actually is, it's a bit of a stretch to break down percent supposedly caused by alcohol. I can readily think of other possible reasons for a correlation.

> we mostly don't really understand what cancer actually is

> it's a bit of a stretch to break down percent supposedly caused by alcohol

eh, I think we know quite a lot about cancers and quite a lot about alcohol's effects on the human body. The fact that it is complex doesn't mean that we don't understand it at all.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3860434/

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#134

Post by bagacrap »

cortic wrote: post #131
EugeneOZ wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Causation, from the article: > Ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage. > Alcohol can also increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Hormones signal cells to grow and divide. With more cell division, there are more opportunities for cancer to develop. Alco…

Thanks. But I think you missed my point, and my second paragraph. But if you think there is an overabundance of accuracy in scientific reporting then perhaps we frequent different places.

so you point is that other, bad studies cause you to ignore good studies such as this one? Strange attitude to hold even while being aware of it

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#135

Post by zoover2020 »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #45
hrh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had friends that had to have 4-6 beers to chill out every night and had been doing that for 20 years. I feel fucking terrible the day after drinking a six-pack; I can't imagine what that does to the body (a lot of the same stuff as sugar). You're slowly killing yourself. Having not known a grandfather due to alcoholism (don't be so hard on the boomers, their fuckups are the fuckups of a generation that went through w…

(don't be so hard on the boomers, their fuckups are the fuckups of a generation that went through ww2) Pretty sure the boomers are the ones that came after WW2, the aforementioned "boom" of their namesake being progeny of those that didn't die during the blitz, Normandy, Stalingrad, and everywhere in between.

Best troll of 2021 yet

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#136

Post by jusssi »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #72
yarcob wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is your personal decision, not a fact. I mean, you could say the same about riding a motorcycle. Riding a motorcycle only slightly increases your risk of dying in a horrible traffic accident, but for a lot of people the risk is big enough that they stop riding once they have kids.

People are aware of motorcycle risks upfront: They go fast. Wrecks are spectacular, and you don't go far to meet someone that has been affected by such an accident. You have safety gear, after all. Alcohol isn't like that. Alcohol is more akin to something like going up stairs or showering or heck, a little similar to smoking. None of these things seem all that dangerous while you do them. But as it turns out, shower…

> Alcohol isn't like that. Alcohol is more akin to something like going up stairs or showering or heck, a little similar to smoking.

Most people I know have someone in their family or friends who has died because of alcohol related diseases or accidents.

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#137

Post by metafunctor »

rtpg wrote: post #95
shafyy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN is filled with these pop-sci teetotalers who rag on alcohol but promote the uninhibited abuse of THC and other dangerous mind altering drugs. It's an absurd bizzaro world. Exactly! People have been drinking for millenia, and while alcohol doesn't make you healthier, it's also clear that drinking "normally" doesn't cause major health issues (unlike, smoking cigarettes for example). Sure, if you drink 2 bottles of…

This call to naturalism is absurd. The fact that people are drinking alcohol for millennia is not proof of it being healthy!! That makes no sense! While I generally agree about arbitrary cutoffs, 2 glasses of wine a day is a good indicator that you have alcohol in your system at least 1/3rd of your life! There are people who don’t get phased by this, but more likely people are just used to it and adapt (much like wit…

Assuming one unit (10ml) stays in your system for one hour, a full bottle of wine per day would be 9 hours (a bit over 1/3 of the time). Two 175ml glasses of 12% wine would then be about 4 hours.

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#138

Post by scotty79 »

synquid wrote: post #70
lovecg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The old meme that “moderate drinking is better than no drinking at all” needs to die: these studies included people who didn’t drink for medical reasons, skewing the average health of the nondrinking cohort down.

https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054 What do you make of studies such as this? Their baseline was strictly lifetime abstainers, absolutely no people who stopped drinking for medical reasons. Still, moderate drinking results in lower all-cause mortality.

It might be that people with worse health tend to abstain from alcohol more often because they feel worse after consuming it. Or that some substances consumed with alcohol, like all other compounds present in wine except for alcohol might have some protective function when consumed regularly.

There are way more possible explanations better than "some amount of ethyl alcohol is actually a little bit beneficial".

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#139

Post by shafyy »

rtpg wrote: post #95
shafyy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN is filled with these pop-sci teetotalers who rag on alcohol but promote the uninhibited abuse of THC and other dangerous mind altering drugs. It's an absurd bizzaro world. Exactly! People have been drinking for millenia, and while alcohol doesn't make you healthier, it's also clear that drinking "normally" doesn't cause major health issues (unlike, smoking cigarettes for example). Sure, if you drink 2 bottles of…

This call to naturalism is absurd. The fact that people are drinking alcohol for millennia is not proof of it being healthy!! That makes no sense! While I generally agree about arbitrary cutoffs, 2 glasses of wine a day is a good indicator that you have alcohol in your system at least 1/3rd of your life! There are people who don’t get phased by this, but more likely people are just used to it and adapt (much like wit…

If you read my comment carefully, I say exactly that. We know it's not healthy, but we also know that there are no crazy long-term effects if you keep it moderate.

My comment is specifically about people saying alcohol is bad but then smoking weed all day or taking LSD and other drugs and think it's good for them.

Re: Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year

#140

Post by BrianOnHN »

ninkendo wrote: post #126
schindlabua wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weed cost me 5 years of my life that I'm never getting back. It's great if some people can form better habits than me but all the weed users I know (plenty) use it every day all day. The biggest detriment is opportunity cost, time you'd spend doing something exciting or productive is spent on watching your Netflix queue instead. Some people claim to get a lot of creative work done while stoned but those people probab…

> Some people claim to get a lot of creative work done while stoned but those people probably haven't tried doing it sober for too long. After smoking every single day for about 5 years I decided to test this hypothesis about a year ago (I had my first kid on the way and didn’t want to be one of those parents that smoked weed.) I also surmised that maybe I really needed to get it all out of my system - by not smoking…

Thanks for the anecdata. I've come to a similar conclusion myself about weed.

My official saying is, "because it works for me doesn't mean it will work for you."

Additionally, alcohol absolutely feels like it destroys my body. Like, two drinks kills my productivity the next day, guaranteed.

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