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No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

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Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#561

Post by avgcorrection »

allturtles wrote: post #358
slothtrop wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s a rubbish comparison.

Of course no amount of driving is safe—that’s commonsensical. You always have a chance of getting harmed when you decide to drive a car. But driving a car has a clear utility which is non-optional in a lot of cases. The utility of recreational alcohol use is, on the other hand, more akin to joyriding—so similar to a completely optional subset of car driving.

Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#562

Post by queuebert »

Zababa wrote: post #482
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

For comparaison, smoking is ~10 years of life expectancy reduction https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal... . Surprisingly obesity seems to only replace some of your last years with years with diabetes, without decreasing your longevity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4951120/ . I think I didn't read that study correctly, or didn't find a good one. Air pollution might be aroun…

> Surprisingly obesity seems to only replace some of your last years with years with diabetes

That can't possibly be right. Obesity is a negative prognostic factor in almost every disease.

Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#563

Post by avgcorrection »

chucksta wrote: post #442
zelphirkalt wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a weird comparison. No one is forcing you to drink alcohol, but you might be forced to drive to the office. One is avoidable, the other one is not. Or if you want to be even more precise: One is easily avoidable and the other might cost you your job.

No one is forcing you to drive to work either. Many people in don't even have a license, yet make it to work each day. You even said it, "might be forced" meaning there are possibilities in which you aren't.

Cue we get into the weeds bickering over the analogy for the rest of the thread.

Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#565

Post by 8bitsrule »

ravenstine wrote: post #263
tharne wrote: post #4

Don'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.

The first time I started to wake up to government one-size-fits-all health policies was back in my 8th grade health class when we were being taught about the food pyramid, and this one kid asked the teacher why hamburgers are considered junk food when they pretty much fit into the model food pyramid. I remember the teacher being stumped and uttered out a barely comprehensible response after an awkward moment. At firs…

> the whole fat being bad thing ... bullshit

I bet it played a big part in the growth of the $71B US diet industry.

Five top wine consumers [0] vs. (coronary disease per 100k [1]): US (79.2), France (31), Italy (51), UK (47), China (114), Russia (225), Spain (38.9)

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/858743/global-wine-consu...

[1] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/coronary-...

Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#566

Post by avgcorrection »

kstrauser wrote: post #159

Although I live in a place where weed is legal, I don’t use it. I enjoy the occasional glass of a nice scotch, though, and I love a good stout or porter beer. This is where it gets a little strange for me: by every metric I can think of, I’d be better off replacing alcohol with weed. There seem to be fewer negative effects, it’s not a source of empty calories, and looks like a better recreational drug in every way. A…

Imagine being haunted by Nancy Reagan in 2022.

Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#567

Post by tomtheelder »

allturtles wrote: post #474
AlwaysRock wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty odd comparison. Some amount of food/caloric intake is healthy or required. Too much is bad. Some amount of water intake is healthy or required. Too much is bad. No amount of arsenic intake is healthy or required. Any is bad. No amount of alcohol intake is healthy or required. Any is bad. Too much of many things is bad. Any amount of some things is bad. Safe may be an odd term for it but alcohols impa…

Arsenic is in all kinds of foods, if you made the claim "no amount of arsenic consumption is safe", you would be arguing that basically everyone's diet is unsafe. What does that even mean? 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.

> 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 should necessarily reduce your consumption to zero. It's that it should not be assumed that there some level of consumption that causes no harm or is beneficial (as previously believed). That is what the phrase "no amount is safe" commonly means in medicine. It is a purely medical recommendation.

This is totally separate from a dietary guideline, which would weigh the risks of alcohol against the social reality of it's consumption. That is the way that you seem to be interpreting it.

Also I'm not the person you responded to originally, but interestingly it seems like arsenic, in tiny quantities, is actually essential to our biology.

Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#568

Post by emtel »

zabzonk wrote: post #320
mywittyname wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is false - boiling the wort is used in probably 99% of commercial and home brewing.

Re: No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation

#570

Post by kube-system »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #536
kube-system wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I disagree with some victimless crimes, like drug possession, victimless crimes that put others at risk does victimize them. It’s the reason that shooting a shotgun down a busy street is (and should be) a crime even if you don’t hit anyone. Also, many violations of regulatory requirements are “victimless” but are entirely necessary cooperation for things to work properly, or to prevent consequential harm. Parti…

You aren't getting it. Who does the bare risk itself victimize? Where is the damage? The risk is just that, a risk. There's a chance it may go bad and a chance that it may not. The risk produces no damage, no victim. But in sufficient quantity the bad outcome will happen enough to be worth making the activity is not allowed. Normally we prohibit the bad outcome but for some highly subjective cases we have to just dra…

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.

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