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.
> It is a biological miracle that your body has DNA repair enzymes Maybe our ancestors who did not have this repair enzymes died while those people whose body mutated to make this enzyme survived?
Or the culture is such that people regularly use alcohol both for pleasure and to avoid their emotional issues. Real men don’t have emotions, and if you’re feeling them then it’s better to knock back a few glasses then to express them.
And why do you think such a culture exists? Did it always exist? What is it influenced and kept up by?
Well, it's not so clear cut. If you live your life according to a Mediterranean lifestyle and drink your glass of wine each day (mostly in a social setting, which is especially important when you grow older), you will be healthier than most other people.
If you live that same life and drink a glass of grape juice instead of wine everyday, you'll live even longer. Alcohol is a poisson and there is no "safe" level. Now, it's a personal decision how much risk is acceptable to you, but don't lie to yourself how "one glass a day is not going to make a difference".
Back in 1999 when I was briefly at the University of Chicago I stayed at the International House, which is a large gothic building with a tower and probably a hundred rooms, and it included a formal library. In this library I found a thick paper-covered volume, entitled something like “Proceedings of the 51st Conference of the International Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons”. Curiously flipping through it, and towards the end of the book, amongst all these other scholarly papers on various aspects of the cardiovascular profession, there was a very unique and curious poem taking like 3-4 pages, entitled “Hiawatha’s Lipid Lowering Drug”. It was nearly impossible to read because it was 3-4 pages of dense, single spaced lines of pure chemical and chemistry lingo, “sterols and etherols, thrombotamates and buyterates...” All I can remember was just a few main impressions and one quote. My main impression was that the poem was written by one of the conference cardiovascular surgeons, after the conference nice and buzzed in his hotel room if not plain drunk. It was also obviously written by a doctor/scientist who knew all the chemistry and terms around lipids and lipid removal. It was also fairly deducable without understanding the terms involved that he was a great advocate of alcohol keeping the heart going through dissolving fat, cholesterol and lipid buildup in the arteries and blood vessels. I also remember the last line of the poem, which was quite impressive after 3-4 pages of recitation of body chemistry and chemicals. The last line was this: “So thought Hiawatha as he staggered from this Congress”.
> 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. 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".
I've seen it many times in posts relating to health, drug use or alcohol: a tendency to piss all over alcohol in particular (cigarettes as a close second) and those who use anything more than a tiny amount of it while hardly blinking at descriptions by others describing THC, LSD, MDMA and all sorts of other ad hoc mind altering drug mixes as a solution to assorted psychological situations. Many people here regularly…
There’s a lot of evidence in clinical trials with MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms (which have a lot of similarity to LSD) regarding efficacy for treating various psychological conditions when used in a safe and guided setting.
Pretty sure we have nothing of the sort for alcohol. Just the opposite, in fact, like this article.
I can’t speak for THC.
I wouldn’t say that this evidence makes any substance more morally “superior” to any other, it all depends on the context of use.
What is “drink” here? How many milliliters, what percentage of alcohol? 40%? 15%? 50ml or 200ml?
I’m starting to see “drinks” measured in terms of volume of pure ethanol. The UK has defined its standard drink as 10ml of pure ethanol, which conveniently comes out to a single 25ml shot of liquor. 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 t…
> The UK has defined its standard drink as 10ml of pure ethanol
This is interesting. In the US a standard drink [1] is often considered roughly equivalent to one can of 5% ABV beer, or a 1.5 fl oz shot of 80 proof liquor. That comes out to about ~17.5 ml of alcohol.
I not-infrequently have beers that are 9% ABV. Maybe I should rethink how many servings of alcohol I have a week by international standards...
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.
> We know it's not healthy, but we also know that there are no crazy long-term effects if you keep it moderate.
I think this claim is unjustified, and that's what your parent comment is trying to point out. Is 14 drinks a week too much? Maybe not, but you aren't likely to find documentary proof of that by looking to the "millennia" of people who did it during an era where those who survived childhood could expect to live to be 60 or so and there was little to no understanding of modern medicine.
If we were able to say with some certainty that 14 drinks a week will give you a 15% chance of getting a serious liver disease, possibly dying from it, I think most people would agree that 14 drinks a week is "dangerous". It's also dangerous at a level that would be near-impossible to discern for generations past.
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.
But that's the point entirely. Showers and going up stairs are everyday activities: Most of us know someone that's been hurt on stairs or in the shower: Shower falls cause lots of injuries every year.
The risks become overlooked because of familiarity and it makes it easier to minimize the risks. It doesn't help that the downsides often aren't immediate: It takes some years to develop disease from it, after all. In general, it takes hours for you to wind up in the hospital or harm someone else - but most of the time, much like showering or walking up the stairs, nothing of note happens.
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…
> 2 glasses of wine a day is a good indicator that you have alcohol in your system at least 1/3rd of your life! What? The standard, conservative 'party line' quoted by national health authorities is that people process around 1 standard drink per hour. A standard glass of wine is 2 standard drinks, so 2 glasses would take 4 hours max to process, or 1/6 of a day. Unless you're using one of those giant glasses and fill…
An hour? That feels pretty quick but I guess the standard is the standard.
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
I just play with my ham radios now. It’s probably healthier than drinking.