171–180 of 233 posts
Alcohol is metabolized into aldehydes which cross link your DNA, literally preserving you as you are alive. It is a biological miracle that your body has DNA repair enzymes which can basically shrug this off. If we didn't have those enzymes drinking alcohol would lead to similar symptoms as radiation poisoning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They start by assuming a causal relationship that we simply don't know actually exists They assume this causal relationship based on decades of randomised controlled trials (the only ethical way to get this information in humans). Their estimate for the risk of cancer based on alcohol consumption comes from previous work which would have carefully summarised the data from these trials and conservatively estimated th…
There are people that drink what the study says to drink, every day? What else would 'controlled' mean in this context?
Not sure, honestly. They seem to pull this data from a WHO database on health statistics [0]. In stricter terms, you are asking if their estimate of what people drink reflects what they really drink in real life. That is, is the estimate biased? I would expect it to be biased in this case.
I am not sure how much it really matters unless you are in charge of large sums of money for public health policy. The best evidence we have suggests alcohol does increase the risk of cancer. Faulty population level alcohol consumption data is not being used for that observation, so it won't matter. Although it would impact the quality of this particular paper.
"Controlled" doesn't appear in the original paper so not sure what you mean there.
0. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/global-information-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The number I see frequently as the threshold of "heavy drinking" is 15 drinks per week, so I certainly agree that it's not accurate to call 14 drinks per week "moderate". 15 drinks per week is actually the limit here for commercial drivers. If you admit to drinking more than that during your annual/semi-annual DMV physical, you have essentially just admitted to alcoholism and can't keep driving class A/B vehicles unl…
and these limits are set arbitrarily and are often even more detrimental. If you know the doc says you can have 14 but not 15, you now have a target to be "ok" when you show up to the doctor. If the gap between 14 and 15 is linear and not somehow logarithmic then you're telling me that consuming exactly two drinks a day will be fine, but that extra scotch you have on friday makes you an alcoholic. This term is thrown…
I've never seen this. Do you have an example article or comment that supports this? It should be easy to find since "HN is filled with these pop-sci teetotalers".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
and these limits are set arbitrarily and are often even more detrimental. If you know the doc says you can have 14 but not 15, you now have a target to be "ok" when you show up to the doctor. If the gap between 14 and 15 is linear and not somehow logarithmic then you're telling me that consuming exactly two drinks a day will be fine, but that extra scotch you have on friday makes you an alcoholic. This term is thrown…
> 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…
Alcohol is metabolized into aldehydes which cross link your DNA, literally preserving you as you are alive. It is a biological miracle that your body has DNA repair enzymes which can basically shrug this off. If we didn't have those enzymes drinking alcohol would lead to similar symptoms as radiation poisoning.
Maybe our ancestors who did not have this repair enzymes died while those people whose body mutated to make this enzyme survived?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came to say the same thing. It seems to me that grape juice would simply make for a different set of problems.
Related: since cancer thrives on sugar, what impact is from the sugars in the wine and beer people drink?
It is frustrating that they lump in any amount of alcohol up to 2 drinks per day as moderate which honestly isn't all that moderate. Still another way to read that is that while alcohol represents a real risk to community health resources you can mitigate 86% of the risk by limiting yourself to ONLY 68 gallons (257 liters) of beer this year. I would not be terribly surprised if most of the issues with moderate drinke…
What is “drink” here? How many milliliters, what percentage of alcohol? 40%? 15%? 50ml or 200ml?
Based on the Netflix documentary I watched, it seems like they’re starting to standardize the labels of alcoholic drinks in the UK to inform consumers how many units of alcohol it represents, and also encouraging people to keep their consumption below X/Y units a day and week.