581–590 of 1001 posts
Everything is a balance though, isn't it? If a little alcohol reduces one's stress and increases socialization, then they may be better off with the alcohol on net.
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> To take the claim "no amount of alcohol consumption is safe" seriously would mean you shouldn't eat bread, which contains a small amount of alcohol. No, it doesn't mean this. What they mean is that any amount of alcohol consumption causes some amount of harm. From the research I have seen it seems to be more or less linear. Minuscule consumption means minimal harm. The implication isn't that you or anyone else shou…
> any amount of alcohol consumption causes some amount of harm There is no guarantee that you will suffer harm from a single drink. What it really means is that any amount of alcohol consumption carries some (possibly minute) risk of harm. This is not, IMO, equivalent to "unsafe", which generally means something well outside the bounds of normal risks that most people already take on in their everyday lives. If we ac…
This is not a lifestyle or dietary recommendation. This is not a cost benefit analysis. This is a medical brief that states that no amount of consumption is safe. The takeaway categorically should not be that we should all reduce our intake to zero, which seems to be how folks are interpreting this.
For what it's worth, I say all this as a regular drinker who has no intention of ceasing drinking.
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To point 1. In the brief I find at the red download link [1] contains the line “ Based on recent evidence, it has been concluded that there is “no safe level of alcohol consumption”(5).” The reference points to an article from The Lancet [2] [1] https://world-heart-federation.org/wp-content/uploads/WHF-Po... [2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Another article from The Lancet from around the same time reported a whopping... 6 months of life expectancy reduction when consuming 100-200g of alcohol a week versus 0-100g of alcohol a week. [1, Figure 4] A drink is 14 grams of alcohol, so that means that your risk from consuming 150 grams, or over 10 drinks a week, is still relatively low in terms of all-cause mortality. Figure 1 also shows that consumption of 0-…
This also seems to support my initial hypothesis from reading your comment which is I wonder how much of the difference in all cause mortality is due to the effects of binge drinking or drunk driving. The fact that the hazard ratio on all cause mortality isn't really above one until you get over 200g would seem to support the idea that that is where most of the increased mortality comes from.
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I've taken liberty on the word "heart" to mean the overall character of a person. I.e. alcohol is beneficial in many other ways, and it must not be dismissed as "just a bad drug" in discussions.
It's a liberty you exploited because clearly the intent of that word refers to a physical heart. Nobody dismisses it as a bad drug, alcohol is too ingrained in human culture to ever be dismissed. What's going on in this thread is scientific reconciliation and justification of ones own behavior. Lots of people live their lives off of scientific facts and conclusions to improve their own health and productivity. This n…
There's an instance right here:
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Risk victimizes those who are exposed to it. When it is trivial to identify a single person who is exposed to the risk, we don't call it "victimless", we call it "endangerment". Why, when an act exposes multiple unnamed people to a risk, do some call it a "victimless" crime? Just because it's difficult to identify those exposed to a risk doesn't mean that people haven't been placed at risk.
>Risk victimizes those who are exposed to it. If you share the road with a drunk driver but they crash into someone else are you a victim? Does their insurer compensate you? Being exposed to risk does not make you a victim. You need to actually be harmed. If your brother takes opiods but stops you are not a victim. If your bother takes opiods, gets addicted and ruins your family then you are. Shooting a gun in the ai…
Crimes of endangerment are an exact counterpoint to this. They often do have identifiable victims, in a way that most people would agree.
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Well, media has been recently overwhelmed by studies showcasing the benefits of weed so that the disadvantages of using it appear to be lower or none at all, but that's not really the case. If smoked, you're smoking tar and volatile compounds that can harm the lungs, much like a regular cigarette - although you're probably not going to smoke a pack of 20 joints in a single day like the moderate-to-heavy smoker next d…
Those are all good points. I still think evidence shows that weed is likely the less harmful option of the two. In the spirit of harm reduction, if I had to choose one of them to start with, weed appears to be the rational choice. But there’s no one telling me I have to use either of them. Coffee is still my favorite drug, and I’ll fight for that one.
Also maybe you prefer one of the highs over the other? I don't drink alcohol before doing sports or going to work, but I might have a coffee.
Granted weed is a depressant like alcohol. But maybe the high is not as enjoyable for you. Maybe you don't find the relaxation after work that you expect from the scotch.
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With beer, this was because the brewer needed to boil the water used in order to kill off any microbes which would compete with the yeast, or it would go "off". It's a very important step for brewing beer. Then the beer would be stored in barrels/casks to help reduce the chance of introducing further microbes, plus the use of preservatives like hops to help keep it longer. With wine, people generally mashed the grape…
> With beer, this was because the brewer needed to boil the water No, they didn't - you do not need (or should) boil the water. If you did boil it, you would then need to let it cool down before adding the yeast. Home-brew kits suggest using a fairly small amount of hot water to disolve the malt extract, and to get it up to fermentation temperature. Beer is safer to drink because the yeast out-competes pathogens, and…
Boiling is a pretty important step in brewing, both in the home and in the commercial brewery. Yes you could technically make beer without boiling it, but that is not the norm. Boiling is used not only for sanitation, but also to allow the hop oils to isomerize and become soluble in the wort, as well as reduce the wort volume to make the wort more concentrated, since the sparging step produces a lot of diluted wort (when using grains rather than extract). Wort in a can (malt extract) means you may not be concerned with concentrating the wort since you could control that, but you still generally want to isomerize the hop oils.
Your point about needing to wait for the wort to cool is correct, but that's precisely what brewers do.. they cool the wort until it gets to yeast 'pitching' temperature
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so Japanese people would live even longer than everyone else than they already do if they didn't drink so much
Japanese people don't drink a lot. They're 17th out of the 17 "high income countries" shown by default here: https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption
Everything is a balance though, isn't it? If a little alcohol reduces one's stress and increases socialization, then they may be better off with the alcohol on net.
It's not obvious that alcohol reduces stress.
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> I don't think sex is linked to many bad health outcomes. Sure it is. STDs, risk of injury, etc.
Bad comparison. Too much of the other stuff will harm you regardless of how careful you are. No amount of sex will harm you, if you're careful.
Too much of anything will harm you.