But low and moderate alcohol consumption is associated with high alcohol consumption (some people become alcoholics after they start drik in low amounts).
Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
21–30 of 108 posts
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#22I find headlines like this unbelievable. Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality. The Canadian and WHO statements make intrinsic sense, it isn't quite smoking, but let's not fool ourselves about what we're doing. I'm still going to consume alcohol, but I'm not going to deceive myself about it negatively impacting my health, regardless of the conclusion of yet another meta-analysis…
But chlorine is also a poison and it actually affects your health very positively: it kills waterborne diseases while not affecting humans at all.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_chlorination)
I can see the case for ethanol also having no long-term effects. Though it is in much larger quantities than chlorine and does have short-term effects, so this is some evidence against it having long-term effects.
I actually agree with you that alcohol is probably bad, but I think the reasoning "of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy" is not correct.
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#23I find headlines like this unbelievable. Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality. The Canadian and WHO statements make intrinsic sense, it isn't quite smoking, but let's not fool ourselves about what we're doing. I'm still going to consume alcohol, but I'm not going to deceive myself about it negatively impacting my health, regardless of the conclusion of yet another meta-analysis…
> Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy
I have two recommendations for you:
1. Look up hormesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
2. Watch out taking statements like that for granted and embed the infamous last words of "Of course"
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#24I find headlines like this unbelievable. Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality. The Canadian and WHO statements make intrinsic sense, it isn't quite smoking, but let's not fool ourselves about what we're doing. I'm still going to consume alcohol, but I'm not going to deceive myself about it negatively impacting my health, regardless of the conclusion of yet another meta-analysis…
The first rule of poison, or of toxicity in general, is that the dose makes the poison.
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#25Note that this is "all cause death". Using the "all cause mortality" (which I assume to be the same) definition from https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...:
"A term that refers to death from any cause. In statistics, all-cause mortality is usually a measure of the total number of deaths from any cause in a specific group of people over a specific period of time. For example, all-cause mortality may be reported for people who live in one area of the country or who are of a specific gender, age, race, or ethnic group."
As I understand it, this means that light to moderate alcohol leads to no additional deaths of any kind for __a specific group in a specific time__. This being a meta-analysis of 4.8m people how did were they able to reduce variation enough to qualify so many to such a study. Meta-analyses are known to be fraught with problems: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7950571/.
Besides, these studies contradict it directly:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26286216/
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#26Who funded this study ? I do not mean the direct fund provider, but who the top-level funder is. I am willing to bet it was funded by some alcohol company(s) or a trade Group funded by some alcohol related group.
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#27I find headlines like this unbelievable. Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality. The Canadian and WHO statements make intrinsic sense, it isn't quite smoking, but let's not fool ourselves about what we're doing. I'm still going to consume alcohol, but I'm not going to deceive myself about it negatively impacting my health, regardless of the conclusion of yet another meta-analysis…
Even if we consider alcohol like poison, an interesting question is how much alcohol leads to significant effects.
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#28Is the consumption measured in studies like this a long-term average? I am not a heavy drinker, but there are plenty of days where I am over 2, or even 4, drinks in a day. Recently I have been averaging less than 1 a day, since I only drink 1 or 2 nights in the week.
These studies always seems to categorize people into X per day buckets, but I don't know many people who drink every day, and I worry about those people, even if their overall consumption is low. I would view someone who drinks 2 drinks on Wednesday, 6 drinks on Friday, and 6 on Saturday as having much healthier consumption than someone who drinks 2 drinks every single day, despite that being the same amount of alcohol.
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#29Who funded this study ? I do not mean the direct fund provider, but who the top-level funder is. I am willing to bet it was funded by some alcohol company(s) or a trade Group funded by some alcohol related group.
You might be on to something.
Re: Low and moderate alcohol consumption not associated with increased mortality
#30I find headlines like this unbelievable. Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality. The Canadian and WHO statements make intrinsic sense, it isn't quite smoking, but let's not fool ourselves about what we're doing. I'm still going to consume alcohol, but I'm not going to deceive myself about it negatively impacting my health, regardless of the conclusion of yet another meta-analysis…
>Of course adding poison to your body is unhealthy and will affect mortality
I'm not sure if I agree with this view. Antibiotics, for example, are a kind of poison and if used under the right circumstances they can reduce the mortality rate.