A room full of cardiologists will raise a glass to that.
No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#352The problem with articles like this is that they lack context on the relative risks of various activities. Is drinking a daily glass of wine more or less bad for your heart than skipping your daily aerobic exercise? Surely we can put some numbers on that.
I think a good measuring stick would be the distance you'd need to drive in a car to generate the same level of risk to your life. Driving is seemingly mundane but I think one of the riskiest things we do on a daily basis in the US.
Driving risk statistics are sort of artificially inflated by deaths and injuries of motorcyclists and DUI/ DWI drivers involved in single-vehicle crashes. If you avoid putting yourself in those categories then driving is much safer than the raw statistics suggest.
There's also a huge variance in risk based on what vehicle you drive. Some larger vehicles have a statistical driver death rate close to zero.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#353Don't worry, in 5-10 years it will be good for you again. I still remember being lectured in school on the food pyramid and the importance of getting your 8-10 servings of grains a day.
Wait, so grains are bad now?
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#354I agree with solox3 about the need to cite the evidence, not just say "studies show."
That said, my doctor asked how much I drank, and I said about four drinks a week. She said "that's too much." So now I have a pretty strict limit of two per week, and "a glass of wine with dinner" does count towards that. I think she was more in tune with ALL the evidence, not just the articles that tell everyone what they want to hear.
People really don't like to hear that two-per-week thing. The beer or glass of wine with friends is a pretty important part of society. In fact, I really think you only live once, and what's the point if you never have the things you really love? But don't delude yourself that it's healthy; it's not.
That said: I lost a brother to alcohol & cigarettes, so it's a little more personal with me.
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can guarantee you the most dangerous part of using any substance is our legal system. Legalize everything for anyone 21 or older, and while we're at it, raise the enlistment age to 21. If you're old enough to die for this country, you should be old enough to light a j in it.
And raise the voting age to 21 too?
I don't see a problem here, politics is probably bad for brain development. 25 might actually be more appropriate.
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#356Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent. While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
>to at least be consistent.
Also worth noting that consistency could be achieved by outlawing alcohol. In the U.S. at least, that proved an impractical solution. So I don't think "we allow one bad thing and we can't get rid of it, so let's allow all bad things" makes a particularly compelling argument.
(FWIW, I'm generally not against legalization nor do I think all drugs are net-negative. I just find the argument as laid out to be unconvincing.)
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#357as someone who grew up i a community that has for many reasons, religious, social, economic that no one really does alcohol. when there is nobody who is drunk, we have 0 drunk driving cases, 0 cases of people ending up in wrong places, 0 cases of alcoholism, 0 cases of "well we will just mix a drink with something more recreational", no need for AA among a host of other things including not having to budget alcohol i…
Because alcohol has been purposely drunk by people for literally thousands of years, and the vast, vast majority of people are able to drink without having a problem?
people have purposely been doing a lot of slavery for thousands of years as well. took us some time but we got over the whole "its been fine for millions of years so it must be good or at least fine" to get to the root of the issue. once we found that, slavery was abolished pretty much everywhere.
my point is, why bring "societal pressure of 500 years" into an argument for an inherently bad thing. just thinking out loud
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#358I am fine with abstinence as a general recommendation, but critical thinking pointed out two issues with the WHF Policy Brief, which I suppose I have read in sufficient depth: 1. There is no citation on the sentence, "Recent evidence has found that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for health." This is really the only line we are interested in. 2. There is no comparison on the effects of alcohol on the body by…
As I recall, for this particular bit of research that I read a couple of months ago, more precisely it states there is no clear discernible level of consumption that could be deemed "safe". That's not really a surprise if you look at the data because it's such a mess. You also can't pin a point at which consumption is a high risk. What does that tell us? You can however surmise that low / moderate consumption is not…
Exactly. I find the claim "no level of alcohol consumption is safe" hyperbolic. You could claim with far more justification that "no amount of driving is safe" since you could be killed pulling out of your driveway but I think most people who drive on a daily basis would find this claim odd. "safety" is a relative, not an absolute condition, since in some sense being alive is unsafe.
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#359Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent. While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
> if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent. Please do not decide policy using this kind of reasoning. Maybe we should legalise more stuff, but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason. > A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. — Ralph Waldo…
The reasoning used to put the policies in place on those "illegal" substances was hardly reasoning in the first place.
So many countries have had great success with legalization, so what is your reasoning for so much caution? It's only continuing the legacy of pain.
Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation
#360Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent. While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
All drugs should be decriminalized. Shooting people in drug raids is far worse for those people than are the drugs. Likewise, locking people in cages with other misfits, criminals, malcontents, and addicts isn’t smart (especially considering that drugs are in the prisons too). If the goal is truly harm reduction, people need to simply work to convince drug users to not use drugs (whether those are opioids, alcohol, t…
I take a lot of Non-FDA approved gray market and black market medicine. If all drugs are legal then such medical drugs should be legal as well. At least the ones I take are health promoting, non-addictive and non-habit forming.
I think a big part of the resistance to legalization is the medical establishment maintaining their monopoly supplier status on medicine.