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What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

hubermanlab.com

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Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are all kinds of people in this world, and we all live very different lives. I can agree with that and I certainly don't care what people do with their lives as long as they don't harm others. However there are people consuming a beer each evening for decades and they are totally fine.. I doubt that is possible with crack.

If you're looking for people who use crack recreationally and also function fine in society, you'll find at least a few in kitchens.

You are comparing people that used crack at least once in their lifetime with people who drink reasonable amounts of alcohol for decades. Then this comparison became basis for comparing effect of crack on people with the effect of alcohol in people. This is disingenuous.

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#142
post #11

Honestly, one bottle of beer turns me from a chronically melancholic and outright boring person, to a functioning, social human being. So, I call BS.

Congratulations. You’ve found your ideal dosage for your unique situation. For many of us, one drink leads to more drinks at which point the physiological and psychological changes covered in the linked article become amplified.

Speak for yourself, do not speak for me.

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#143
post #2

Anyone have their own cure for a hangover the following day after drinking heavily? My usual go-to is a 'Full English Breakfast' that has all the trimmings and it replaces lost electrolytes in my system and 'cures' me although it's only a band-aid solution. There's nothing you can really do except wait a bad hangover out and let your body repair itself after essentially ingesting poison. Lucozade is another thing we…

A colleague insists on an Aspirin before sleep, this only with the idea that you sleep at least somewhat acceptably.

I myself drink some cheap powder electrolytes.

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#144
post #71

non alcoholic beers have only gotten better over the years. thats my go to unless its a big big life event.

Absolutely. I started rotating between alcoholic and non-alcoholic beers when going out. All feels normal yet I consume half the alcohol.

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been that if I adjust my diet to remove all carbs, which is close to the diet that human beings evolved on, then any alcoholic beverage tastes like poison to me and the hangover comes on faster. The buzz is also worse -- just woozy and sick feeling. Once you clean up your diet you'll lose your taste for alcohol. Your body really can't tolerate alcohol in any amount and once you've eliminated the oth…

If you go on any exclusion diet then I'd expect foods you're no longer accustomed to would affect you. I suspect that if a committed vegan were to eat a steak then they would have a variety of both mental and biological reactions. Regarding your comment about removing carbs being the diet we evolved with, I always presumed that we had always eaten fruit and vegetables. Grains didn't become a significant part of our d…

I'm sure ancient humans ate fruit from time to time, but there are a few factors to consider:

1. ancient fruit was much different than modern fruit, which has been bred over a millennium to be larger, have fewer seeds, more sugar, etc. Ancient fruit would have been small, sour seedy stuff with lots rind compared to what we think of as fruit today.

2. ancient fruit would not only have been extremely seasonal (just a couple of months a year, and only then if you lived in the tropics) but humans would have had to compete with monkeys and parrots and squirrels and insects and scores of other animals to get the fruit -- and the monkeys and parrots would probably have the advantage...

3. the caloric return on eating fruit is not that great -- the alternative back in the ancient days was to kill one of the mega fauna (all of which humans drove to extinction because they hunted so much). One wooly mammoth contains enough calories to feed a large tribe for the better part of a year. In fact, anthropologists have noted that the remains of Home Erectus are universally found in conjunction with mammoth bones -- they apparently lived on nothing but mammoth for a million years.

4. ancient humans lived through ice ages -- they survived through a period roughly 30,000 to 20,000 years ago (Last Glacial Maximum) in which glaciers were a mile deep over what is currently Manhattan. All of Canada was covered in ice -- and yet the Inuit lived there for thousands of years through that ice age -- hundreds of generations. Obviously these people weren't eating any fruit while living on a glacier. Even today there are people groups who live in the far north, such as the Sami, who are almost exclusively carnivorous. In fact there are several know human populations that have been almost entirely carnivorous, such as the Maasai, who live off meat, blood, and milk, and the Comanche, who lived off nothing but Bison.

5. Fruit is almost entirely fiber and carbs, both of which can be entirely removed from the human diet without any negative consequence. I expect that ancient humans were absolute masters of their environments and understood the plant life around them extraordinarily well, but I expect that they lived by the dictum that "animals are food and plants are medicine". They would likely consume plants not for nourishment, but for some other effect.

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#147
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't 8000 years ago about the time the Bible says that humanity began to sin?

According to the literal reading of the old testament, humanity did not even exist by then, and the world itself did not exist. There can't be a bad habit as old as 8000 years.

I think you mean "literalistic". When the plain words are plainly meant to be understood in a non-literal way, then to interpret them literally is in fact not to interpret them "literally". I use the word "literalistic" for the kind of moronic reasoning that assumes that if one of King David's psalms says that God will shelter you under his wings, then that means that God must have wings. Or when the author of The Song of Songs writes "Your eyes are the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim" then that means that this woman's eyes are actually the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim.

So if you're going to be a moron, then you can claim that the Bible teaches that the world was created in six days 6,000 years ago, with the light from distant stars already in transit.

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#148

Alcohol is the most harmful drug out there[1] - worse than heroin, crack cocaine, and all the rest. It boggles my mind how common it is, while genuinely useful drugs like psilocybin are still Schedule I and relegated to the shadows. [1]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/s0140-6736(10)61462-6 https://i.imgur.com/DQDJMGt.png

What a nonsense.. there are millions of people drinking alcohol sporadically and are doing fine. I don't think there are that many people sporadically consuming crack and are doing fine. Now I guess you can define harmful in many ways and I didn't read the study and probably won't.

> What a nonsense.. there are millions of people drinking alcohol sporadically and are doing fine. I don't think there are that many people sporadically consuming crack and are doing fine.

I don't know any numbers, but I do know there are people who consume crack recreationally and are doing fine. It's hard to compare to alcohol though, since alcohol is much more readily available and easier to get for a large amount of the population.

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#149

Alcohol is the most harmful drug out there[1] - worse than heroin, crack cocaine, and all the rest. It boggles my mind how common it is, while genuinely useful drugs like psilocybin are still Schedule I and relegated to the shadows. [1]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/s0140-6736(10)61462-6 https://i.imgur.com/DQDJMGt.png

What a nonsense.. there are millions of people drinking alcohol sporadically and are doing fine. I don't think there are that many people sporadically consuming crack and are doing fine. Now I guess you can define harmful in many ways and I didn't read the study and probably won't.

Was about to say, I can see how one can try making a claim that alcohol is more harmful than cannabis l or even cocaine.

But crack and especially heroin (fentanyl would go here as well)? That instantly made me lose any belief in credibility of that reply, sadly. Anyone who has seen what those drugs end up doing to literally everyone who starts using them, it's not even close. And that's despite the fact that heavy alcoholism absolutely can churn out some extremely awful scenarios where people turn into monsters.

It's like hearing someone tell you with full-on seriousness that bicycles going at their typical speeds (15-20mph) colliding with pedestrians will cause more physical damage to pedestrians than a pickup truck going at its typical speed (45mph+).

Re: What alcohol does to your body, brain and health [video]

#150
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for people who use crack recreationally and also function fine in society, you'll find at least a few in kitchens.

You are comparing people that used crack at least once in their lifetime with people who drink reasonable amounts of alcohol for decades. Then this comparison became basis for comparing effect of crack on people with the effect of alcohol in people. This is disingenuous.

I'm not sure that's the comparison that's being made. At least the phrasing suggests they think it's more ongoing than "at least once".

> If you're looking for people who use crack recreationally

That seems to suggest something more similar to consuming "reasonable amounts" for an extended period. I personally don't know how common that would be (since I don't tend to hang around kitchens in restaurants) but it does sound rather different from "people that used crack at least once in their lifetime".

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