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Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

newscientist.com

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Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#41

Post by bee_rider »

supahfly_remix wrote: post #6

Have there been studies of nominally non-drinking sub-populations, such as Mormons or Muslims, to understand the effects of alcohol?

I imagine picking people from one particular religion or culture is bound to introduce statistical skews.

Mormons do seem to skew toward abstinence from a lot of unhealthy habits, but the stereotype is that they drink a lot of soda, right? That’s bound to do something.

Plus if a group has a strong stigma against alcohol you’ll probably get some members with an unusually high incentive to miss-report whether or not they drink.

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#42

Post by davidhbolton »

This NS piece is complete misinformation. This below is by a writer who has been writing about this sort of thing for years.

"Tim Stockwell has been up to his old tricks. In a study that was widely publicised this week despite being published in January, he claims - yet again - that moderate drinking does not confer health benefits. The study is largely a rehash of his meta-analysis from last year (which I wrote about here) so there isn’t much more to say except to note the extraordinary amount of cherry-picking that is required to come to such a conclusion.

He and his team started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which they added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. They then discarded 103 of these because they didn’t meet Stockwell’s increasingly stringent and somewhat arbitrary criteria. This left 107 studies, but there was still work to do.

In the new study, he introduces yet another filter for “quality” and reduces the number of studies down from 21 to 18 and then 15, but these still show lower risk for moderate drinkers, so he introduces some more criteria until a vast literature built up over 50 years is whittled down to just six studies. This gets rid of the apparent benefits of moderate drinking. He then removes one more study and, voila!, moderate drinkers are now at greater risk than teetotallers."

https://snowdon.substack.com/p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-o...

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#43

Post by fsloth »

monero-xmr wrote: post #2

They never include the mental benefits of alcohol. A night out drinking with friends or coworkers has mental health benefits that last, sometimes a lifetime.

I have cherished memories of boozing out with friends but I would not link this to ”mental health” benefits given the documented onset mental health issues including depression and alcoholism is directly linked to alcohol consumption.

Drinking occasionally can be ’fun’ and it can have social benefits but in large scale studies of populations increase in alcohol usage don’t show ”mental health benefits”.

I would state ’studies have not found quantifiable benefits of alchol use’ and that can still coexist with claims that the benefits of alcohol to yourself are not quantifiable - which is sort of fair, many aspects of human life are beyond reach of clear metrics.

The adverse effects, however, are quite quantitifiable by healthcare statistics. While outcomes vary in different populations, the outcomes are never positive (per current resarch).

”I find a few drinks per week with friends enjoyable” is not a claim that would be in contest with the above. It’s just not a population argument.

Some people like it, some can sustain a lifetime of boozing, but there is a non-trivial amount of people who develop depression or alcoholism - and this is not a flaw of character or culture but simply a fact of interaction of alcohol with human biology and neurology.

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#44

Post by FredPret »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #28
FredPret wrote: post #15

Here’s one of the fundamental problems with studying human diet and psychology, from the article: > The best way to assess the effects of alcohol would be to randomly assign people to drink it or not in childhood and then monitor their health and drinking over the rest of their lives. Since such studies cannot be done, researchers instead have to ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over much shorte…

The other being the myriad of influencing factors you can never really isolate. Say you do the setup from the quote, then one group would also be in a special situation where researchers told them to do this thing, and they would tell their friends, or maybe they would keep it secret, or maybe it would make them a bit weird, or maybe it would pave the way for more addictions, or make them more conscious of it, and th…

That’s right. Studies will say that they “control for age and income” but even doing just that is probably not possible, unless

a) you break a number of laws and ethical rules

and b) you have a population of hundreds of billions of humans to study. Humans are very different from one another in important but subtle ways.

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#45

Post by FredPret »

goda90 wrote: post #37
FredPret wrote: post #15

Here’s one of the fundamental problems with studying human diet and psychology, from the article: > The best way to assess the effects of alcohol would be to randomly assign people to drink it or not in childhood and then monitor their health and drinking over the rest of their lives. Since such studies cannot be done, researchers instead have to ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over much shorte…

I hope someday we could develop computers that can do a molecularly accurate simulation of the human body. Then we could try all the inputs we can imagine, with a bunch of different sets of genes, and figure out exactly what's good or not.

True - but then the simulation will have human rights

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#46

Post by ImHereToVote »

jokoon wrote: post #24

At the army, I remember a doctor insisting on a very precise answer to the question if I was drinking alcohol "never" or "rarely". for coffee it's probably very similar we say "the dose makes the poison" but it doesn't change that regularly drinking a low dose of poison is not good.

Yet coffee consumption is correlated with longer life. Probably the Quercetin and Trigonelline in coffee offsets the supposed damage.

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#47

Post by pfdietz »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #29
pfdietz wrote: post #5

Ethanol is metabolized to acetaldehyde. Aldehydes form crosslinks between proteins and DNA (and DNA with itself). Inactivation of the aldehyde-metabolizing ALDH2 enzyme (which happens in 50% of East Asians) increases risk for various disorders including cancer and late-onset Alzheimer's. Cancers linked to alcohol use: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-... The American Cancer Society recommen…

Acetaldehyde is also be metabolized by the brain for energy. May be why some people get so addicted.

I think it would be preferable to fuel your brain with something that isn't also a carcinogen.

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#48

Post by blackbrokkoli »

_heimdall wrote: post #9
monero-xmr wrote: post #2

They never include the mental benefits of alcohol. A night out drinking with friends or coworkers has mental health benefits that last, sometimes a lifetime.

In your experience, is the alcohol required to enjoy the night out? I've personally had nights out with and without alcohol that were just as much fun. I'm also very much a homebody though, so I'm not a great sample to really say either way.

I think that may be a moot point if you move from an individual level to a societal level.

Like, the positive effects that their success in baseball has on the Dominican Republic would likely also be there if they would commit that hard to basketball, or chess (and maybe that would come with less knee injuries). Yet, it's still correct to say that baseball is hugely beneficial to the DomRep.

My larger point being that we have to disentangle "what should you do on your evenings" and "what is a good cultural approach to this issue"

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#49

Post by jbmny »

monero-xmr wrote: post #2

They never include the mental benefits of alcohol. A night out drinking with friends or coworkers has mental health benefits that last, sometimes a lifetime.

I agree with you. It comes down to risks vs benefits, and I feel that for a huge number of people that aren't predisposed to addiction, that don't need to drink to the point of blacking out, etc., it may very well be worth it.

I know that my "principled" refusal to drink in my younger years made socializing a lot harder and just generally put a barrier between myself and my peers. Of course, a stronger person could overcome those challenges without alcohol, but that seems like a Herculean task for someone who's already shy and lacking self-esteem.

I guess I just don't see it as black and white.

Re: Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

#50

Post by kragen »

pfdietz wrote: post #5

Ethanol is metabolized to acetaldehyde. Aldehydes form crosslinks between proteins and DNA (and DNA with itself). Inactivation of the aldehyde-metabolizing ALDH2 enzyme (which happens in 50% of East Asians) increases risk for various disorders including cancer and late-onset Alzheimer's. Cancers linked to alcohol use: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-... The American Cancer Society recommen…

interesting! acetaldehyde is liebig's original gangster aldehyde, before even formaldehyde. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde also says, 'acetaldehyde occurs naturally in coffee, bread, and ripe fruit, and is produced by plants.'

can you use acetaldehyde to crosslink proteins and polysaccharides to make thermosetting bioplastics? apparently you can use it to crosslink urea, just as you can with formaldehyde

looks like the answer is yes, at least if the polysaccharide is chitosan: https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/7/1/10

there isn't enough acetaldehyde in bread and fresh fruit or alcoholics' livers to be a practical source for this purpose, but one traditional acetaldehyde process was catalytic dehydrogenation of ethanol on a copper-based catalyst at 260°–290°, which seems like the kind of thing that john plant might feature on the next episode of primitive technology

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