As I tried to point out in another thread, the WHO, AMA, AHA, etc in 2005 designated alcohol as the next target to reduce disease. Those 3-letter acronyms are funding majority negative alcohol effect study as it agrees with their literal ‘global agenda’. That’s why researchers are producing negative alcohol effect studies and why they are so popular. Researchers want to get published. It’s also clear that much of the work is meta study or simple questionnaire. In other words, much of the new negative alcohol publications aren’t based on actual science. See? No tin-foil hats required
As for this study...
> Between April 1993 and December 1998, 63 257 individuals completed an in-person interview that included questions on usual diet, demographics, height and weight, use of tobacco, usual physical activity, menstrual and reproductive history (women only), medical history, and family history of cancer. The institutional review boards at the National University of Singapore and the University of Minnesota approved this study.
They asked people a bunch of questions about their behavior and “usual diet” in actuality exact diet would be a more accurate indicator of disease precursors... diet controls so much of everyone’s lives and deaths more than any other modern daily life input. Unless they are consuming large amounts of alcohol aka heavy drinkers.
I've tried diethyl ether <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethyl_ether#Recreational_use... recreationally. It is interesting (the metacognition part) but not very pleasant (the vapour is odourous and actually painful on your nose/lungs if huffed), and difficult to swallow if ingested. Also you stink for hours afterwards. And it's dangerously flammable.
As always, when I try something new I do a lot of reading up first to suss the risks, and one article I came across claimed that it was less harmful than alcohol. I don't know if that's true, just reporting.
Read up erowid experiences first if you do try it.
And if you do, don't be fucking stupid - I get tired of the way people so easily abuse any drug, even alcohol. Perhaps especially alcohol.
Umm, I doubt it. I mentioned ether in response to the question about alcohol, and didn't make it clear that my point was the effect is similar to alcohol (though not quite the same - you retain some clarity and you don't get hungry afterwards).
You're no more likely to hallucinate on one any more than the other IME. I guess it's acid or mescaline instead.
I understand that F&LiLV tended to big up (or even invent) the drugs' effects (bullshit about adrenochrome? "In the DVD commentary, director Terry Gilliam admits that his and Thompson's portrayal is a fictional exaggeration" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome>). Ether just gets you pissed a bit like booze, that's all.
Oh, here we go “The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon [...]” <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/320840-the-only-thing-that-...
I love a good weekend drink as much as the next person but it’s very obvious that alcohol is literal poison and best to be avoided. That conclusion doesn’t require a bunch of health organizations to conspire.
It's basically "some bureaucrats want to secure funds for their agencies and have some global mission to justify them, so they invent new targets when the previous ones have dragged too long, so like the "war on drugs", "war on fat", etc. before, you now have more "war on alcohol", etc. And since those control a lot of money, and public policy, they get to decide where grants go, and you get to up your chances of a career if you go along. Plus all the private interests that can be attached to that (e.g. selling non-alcoholic versions of beverages, etc).
>but it’s very obvious that alcohol is literal poison and best to be avoided
No, it's not "very obvious" at all. It's just the residuals of the tee-totaling puritanical view of alcohol ("it must be bad!"), or considering alcoholics at the canonical example of what happens when you consume alcohol (and not e.g. the blue zone diets, where people live more than anybody else on the planet on average, and still regularly consume alcohol). In other words, it's as obvious as "fat makes us fat".
Science is not about accepting some "obvious", it's about investigating what's actually the case.
To our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging through the trees, however, the ethanol in rotting fruit would have had three other appealing characteristics. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell that makes the fruit easy to locate. Second, it’s easier to digest, allowing animals to get more of a commodity that was precious back then: calories. Third, its antiseptic qualities repel microbes that might sicken a primate. Millions of years ago one of them developed a taste for fruit that had fallen from the tree. “Our ape ancestors started eating fermented fruits on the forest floor, and that made all the difference,” says Nathaniel Dominy, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “We’re preadapted for consuming alcohol.”
I don’t have a dog in this fight, just curious, is there any experimentally proven benefit? Smell, ease of digestion and being an antiseptic (which I believe you mean in relation to fermented fruit) have nothing to do with modern alcohol consumption.
I understand its utility as a social lubricant. My guess is that’s why it has persisted for thousands of years. But don’t you think alcohol is a societal net negative?
>I understand its utility as a social lubricant. My guess is that’s why it has persisted for thousands of years. But don’t you think alcohol is a societal net negative?
If it helps people party, mingle, and eventually create babies, it's a net positive for the survival of the species...
Also, some things can still be positive by fiat, even if the logistics (e.g. re health) are against them.
We're not on this planet just to live as long as we can. That's not a goal in itself. There might not be a goal in the end too -- e.g. it all might be meaningless.
In any case, if we're here to enjoy our stay, and alcohol (or e.g. taking risks) is part of that, then those things are good for us, even if it means we lose some years to them.
I actually like your nihilistic rationalization here.
If one is overtly optimiziming for health and longevity, drinking is a bad idea.
If one is optimizing for enjoyment, drink.
And of course there is a middle ground. Although I would say that alchohol is specifically designed to remove the middle ground (drinking alchohol dehydrates you, so you drink more, etc).
Anyway, I appreciate your stance and find it to be the most honest pro-alchohol comment thus far.
This changes over time. In my 20s and 30s alcohol was mainly a social lubricant in my circles. Now what I see in my 40s is most of my peers have a drink or two at night after a day of work, the kids are asleep, the dishes are done, etc... to have a little bit of ease at the end of the night. It’s a little reward for getting through the day intact and a chance for a sliver of unwind time.
The problem is everything is a poison in quantity. Moderation is key with anything.
The agenda was clearly indicated. Please reread my parent post, Reduce alcohol consumption.
We consume many extremely dangerous poisons throughout the day and there is not a ton of research of the effects of those molecules. Or there is and almost no follow up action.
I guess my point is the risk of alcohol consumption is incredibly high and the reward is incredibly low. It’s an irrational game we play (myself included, my wife and I will surely share a bottle of wine tonight at dinner).
I get your point but like it or not alcohol is very complex and has many benefits as well as deficits. What organizations are doing now to alcohol with their studies is the equivalent of what people did to marijuana in the 40s and 50s. They decided alcohol was bad and then they went about producing propaganda and attributing science fortify their claims. In limited quantities alcohol has been shown to improve sleep, reduce stress, thin blood, and increase social behaviors. All of these are huge markers for life longevity and lower mortality. If you’re really concerned about poisons and risk factors you would look at the American diet and realize just what havoc it’s wreaking on its population, i.e. diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and heart disease. Statistically you will likely die of one of them
Alcohol DESTROYS sleep. You wont like any of the studies that google comes up with, so do what I did. Buy an Oura ring, get your baseline sleep data, then have just two glasses of wine and see what happens. It's crazy what just a little alcohol does to the quality of your sleep.
Any increase in social behaviors are vastly outweighed by anti-social behavior.
I agree with you on stress reduction but that is a dangerous, dangerous game.
In limited quantities it can be a sleep ad. Anti-social is drinking too much. Stop conflating over drinking affects with moderate drinking affects.
> DESTROYS
Stop with the hyperbole. No it doesn’t and google doesn’t bring up good sound science, it brings up clickbait, “experts”, and tons of hearsay/case study. Real science on moderate drinking is hard to perform, because there are so many other factors at play..... such as genetics, diet, exercise, smoking, air pollution, water pollution, antibiotics, The proliferation of sugar and refined grains, the over use of pharmaceuticals, persistent inorganic compounds, insecticides, herbicides, fertilizers, growth hormones, and radiation. But concentrate on negative aspects of alcohol because it seems to fit your agenda. Meanwhile there are millions of happy people who have good friends, sleep well, have a great job, eat healthy, have decent monetary stream and can have a drink or two without turning in to a sloppy abusive mess. People who drink alcohol in moderation tend with live longer than abstinent sober people... how do I know that? I googled it
While alcohol will help put you to sleep (so will a concussion) it inhibits the restorative function of sleep. (1,2,3)
I’m all for the hedonistic rationalization for alcohol. We all need a release. But it is disingenuous to say alcohol has any positive effects beyond that. It is no different than sugar in that regard. My Saturday night cheat meal is filled with both, and I always look forward to it. But I don’t try and pretend that it’s in any way good for me (beyond psychological).
To that end, I completly agree with you that there are plenty of people who enjoy a few drinks without any real damage. I'm saying classify alchohol for what it it. The tobacco and sugar (4,5) lobbies love to pretend that they are something which they are not to sway public opinion. That is dangerous to society.
But it's not a sleep aid. Seriously. The idea of a nightcap has been thoroughly debunked.
Alcohol is a sedative, being sedated is not the same as being asleep. I'd suggest looking in to Dr. Matthew Walker's research on the effects of alcohol and sleep if you want to have a clearer picture.
Yes, it can be. But it can also be more complicated than that. Reducing the effects of alcohol to its direct impact on health is just that: reductionist. Then drawing moral conclusions from it, as many readers of such reports do, is a fallacy.
>my wife and I will surely share a bottle of wine tonight at dinner
For example, many people will have found wives because of alcohol, which acts as a 'social lubricant'. Having a wife is good for one's health, etc.
This is a bad type of argument that has to stop. Water has literally nothing to do with how good alcohol is or isn't for you. If you insist on comparing the two, consider that if you stop drinking water you die in a couple of days. If you stop drinking alcohol you generally become healthier.
"X isn't bad because literally anything can be bad in some scenario! If you eat too many bean sprouts you'll choke and die, so it must be fine to eat arsenic, right??"
I don't understand this counter argument. I drink less than a glass of wine a day and because quantity is a critical factor when considering a poison, to me, alcohol is literally not a poison. Just because some people drink too much, but not including amount in the argument don't you miss completely all the safe uses of it?
Faulty logic. Practically everything can be a poison. The poison is the dose. There is no argument that heavy alcohol use is detrimental to your health. There is still quite a bit of argument whether or not moderate alcohol use has benefits. And where are the benefits? Does it benefit the human as a whole as in- the benefits in one area (anti coagulant, anti inflammatory) outweigh the additional risks of (throat cancer, breast cancer)?
Doesn't seem obvious to me. You should conduct a study where you simply proclaim things as obvious.
There is nothing wrong with those acronyms. In fact studies that promote moderate alcohol consumptions as healthy are more suspect if you want to take the sponsorship angle.
Moderatee alcohol use can have small benefits on certain diseases, but overall mortality seems have no such connection.
Yeah, and the next study will re-instate that drinking can be healthy.
Until those studies have been going on for decades, with counter studies, and criticism, etc, and end up part of conventional 101 university curriculum, any individual study (even meta-study, also shoddily done more often than not) is not worth the paper they are printed on for the average reader.
You cannot criticize academic studies here. You see, everything has to be evaluated on its own merit, so you have to read all 535.134 pro and 611.232 contra studies and have time to debate them, just like a bureaucrat.
Alternatively, quote a rogue authority, like Feynman:
"A committee is twelve people doing the work of one".
Unfortunately, one study cannot “debunk” anything.
Between the state of conflicting information in epidemiology, the replication crisis in science in general, self reporting methodology, publication bias, etc . . . there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. That’s not even a remark on the findings; even if the findings were the opposite, all these undermining factors would remain.
> Because the variants have specific and large effects on alcohol, but do not effect other lifestyle factors such as diet, smoking, economic status or education, they can be used by scientists to nail down causal effects of alcohol intake.
Well, yes, but only in people with a similar genetic background. Using this as a kind of instrumental variable assumes an additive or linear model of genome environment interactions which is about as realistic as a flat Earth model. It may be that this study is being oversold.
The article seems to say that it is the blood pressure that statistically causes strokes, and that even moderate drinking statistically raises blood pressure. Is that a fair summary?
"A linear dose-response relationship was found between alcohol consumption and gallstone disease risk and the risk of gallstone disease decreased by 12% (RR=0.88, 95% CI: 0.84-0.92; Pnonlinearity=0.079) for each 10 g/day increment in alcohol consumption. This meta-analysis suggests that alcohol consumption is associated with significantly decreased risk of gallstone disease."
[2] Alcohol Consumption Can Reduce the Risk of Gallstone Disease: A Systematic Review with a Dose-Response Meta-Analysis of Case-Control and Cohort Studies.
"In this systematic review with meta-analysis, alcohol consumption could decrease the risk of GSD, and the dose-response analysis revealed a dose-dependent linear risk reduction and a weakened linear trend between alcohol consumption levels less than and greater than 28 g/day."
Depends, it might also be a feature if you suspect people under-report their drinking. Your non-drinking group may in fact be drinking just as much as your moderate drinking group.
> This [..] study [..] focused on people of East Asian descent, many of whom have genetic variants that limit alcohol tolerance.
> Because the variants have specific and large effects on alcohol, but do not effect other lifestyle factors such as diet, smoking, economic status or education, they can be used by scientists to nail down causal effects of alcohol intake
and
> The research team - including scientists from Oxford and Peking universities and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said it would be impossible to do a study of this kind in Western populations, since almost no-one there has the relevant alcohol-intolerance gene variants.
No shit. The only reason people think that moderate consumption is healthy is because of widely publicized studies by the alcohol industry that were manipulated to create the illusion that moderate consumption is healthy. And because they want to rationalize their own behavior.
To each their own, but I decided to quit drinking about 20 years ago and haven't missed it a bit. I feel healthier, I have more money, and best of all I am proud to say I've always been sober in front of my kids.
49 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadAs for this study...
> Between April 1993 and December 1998, 63 257 individuals completed an in-person interview that included questions on usual diet, demographics, height and weight, use of tobacco, usual physical activity, menstrual and reproductive history (women only), medical history, and family history of cancer. The institutional review boards at the National University of Singapore and the University of Minnesota approved this study.
They asked people a bunch of questions about their behavior and “usual diet” in actuality exact diet would be a more accurate indicator of disease precursors... diet controls so much of everyone’s lives and deaths more than any other modern daily life input. Unless they are consuming large amounts of alcohol aka heavy drinkers.
Source study: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha....
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/alco...
As always, when I try something new I do a lot of reading up first to suss the risks, and one article I came across claimed that it was less harmful than alcohol. I don't know if that's true, just reporting.
Read up erowid experiences first if you do try it. And if you do, don't be fucking stupid - I get tired of the way people so easily abuse any drug, even alcohol. Perhaps especially alcohol.
I can't particularly recommend it.
FYI anyway.
edit: formatting
You're no more likely to hallucinate on one any more than the other IME. I guess it's acid or mescaline instead.
I understand that F&LiLV tended to big up (or even invent) the drugs' effects (bullshit about adrenochrome? "In the DVD commentary, director Terry Gilliam admits that his and Thompson's portrayal is a fictional exaggeration" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome>). Ether just gets you pissed a bit like booze, that's all.
Oh, here we go “The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon [...]” <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/320840-the-only-thing-that-...
yep, that strikes me as bullshit.
I love a good weekend drink as much as the next person but it’s very obvious that alcohol is literal poison and best to be avoided. That conclusion doesn’t require a bunch of health organizations to conspire.
It's basically "some bureaucrats want to secure funds for their agencies and have some global mission to justify them, so they invent new targets when the previous ones have dragged too long, so like the "war on drugs", "war on fat", etc. before, you now have more "war on alcohol", etc. And since those control a lot of money, and public policy, they get to decide where grants go, and you get to up your chances of a career if you go along. Plus all the private interests that can be attached to that (e.g. selling non-alcoholic versions of beverages, etc).
>but it’s very obvious that alcohol is literal poison and best to be avoided
No, it's not "very obvious" at all. It's just the residuals of the tee-totaling puritanical view of alcohol ("it must be bad!"), or considering alcoholics at the canonical example of what happens when you consume alcohol (and not e.g. the blue zone diets, where people live more than anybody else on the planet on average, and still regularly consume alcohol). In other words, it's as obvious as "fat makes us fat".
Science is not about accepting some "obvious", it's about investigating what's actually the case.
And there's the historical perspective:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/09/3-questi...
Or:
To our fruit-eating primate ancestors swinging through the trees, however, the ethanol in rotting fruit would have had three other appealing characteristics. First, it has a strong, distinctive smell that makes the fruit easy to locate. Second, it’s easier to digest, allowing animals to get more of a commodity that was precious back then: calories. Third, its antiseptic qualities repel microbes that might sicken a primate. Millions of years ago one of them developed a taste for fruit that had fallen from the tree. “Our ape ancestors started eating fermented fruits on the forest floor, and that made all the difference,” says Nathaniel Dominy, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “We’re preadapted for consuming alcohol.”
I understand its utility as a social lubricant. My guess is that’s why it has persisted for thousands of years. But don’t you think alcohol is a societal net negative?
If it helps people party, mingle, and eventually create babies, it's a net positive for the survival of the species...
Also, some things can still be positive by fiat, even if the logistics (e.g. re health) are against them.
We're not on this planet just to live as long as we can. That's not a goal in itself. There might not be a goal in the end too -- e.g. it all might be meaningless.
In any case, if we're here to enjoy our stay, and alcohol (or e.g. taking risks) is part of that, then those things are good for us, even if it means we lose some years to them.
If one is overtly optimiziming for health and longevity, drinking is a bad idea.
If one is optimizing for enjoyment, drink.
And of course there is a middle ground. Although I would say that alchohol is specifically designed to remove the middle ground (drinking alchohol dehydrates you, so you drink more, etc).
Anyway, I appreciate your stance and find it to be the most honest pro-alchohol comment thus far.
And why not?
>I’m quite sure the babies will get made just fine without alcohol.
Yes, but would they be as happy once they rich drinking age?
Millenia of civilization says: "no".
At worst, they'd found some other mind-altering substitute.
In any quantity? Prove it
The problem is everything is a poison in quantity. Moderation is key with anything.
The agenda was clearly indicated. Please reread my parent post, Reduce alcohol consumption.
We consume many extremely dangerous poisons throughout the day and there is not a ton of research of the effects of those molecules. Or there is and almost no follow up action.
Any increase in social behaviors are vastly outweighed by anti-social behavior.
I agree with you on stress reduction but that is a dangerous, dangerous game.
> DESTROYS
Stop with the hyperbole. No it doesn’t and google doesn’t bring up good sound science, it brings up clickbait, “experts”, and tons of hearsay/case study. Real science on moderate drinking is hard to perform, because there are so many other factors at play..... such as genetics, diet, exercise, smoking, air pollution, water pollution, antibiotics, The proliferation of sugar and refined grains, the over use of pharmaceuticals, persistent inorganic compounds, insecticides, herbicides, fertilizers, growth hormones, and radiation. But concentrate on negative aspects of alcohol because it seems to fit your agenda. Meanwhile there are millions of happy people who have good friends, sleep well, have a great job, eat healthy, have decent monetary stream and can have a drink or two without turning in to a sloppy abusive mess. People who drink alcohol in moderation tend with live longer than abstinent sober people... how do I know that? I googled it
I’m all for the hedonistic rationalization for alcohol. We all need a release. But it is disingenuous to say alcohol has any positive effects beyond that. It is no different than sugar in that regard. My Saturday night cheat meal is filled with both, and I always look forward to it. But I don’t try and pretend that it’s in any way good for me (beyond psychological).
To that end, I completly agree with you that there are plenty of people who enjoy a few drinks without any real damage. I'm saying classify alchohol for what it it. The tobacco and sugar (4,5) lobbies love to pretend that they are something which they are not to sway public opinion. That is dangerous to society.
1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acer.12006 2. https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501... 3. https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/ 4. http://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/sugar-papers-reveal-industry-ro... 5. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-sc...
But it's not a sleep aid. Seriously. The idea of a nightcap has been thoroughly debunked.
Alcohol is a sedative, being sedated is not the same as being asleep. I'd suggest looking in to Dr. Matthew Walker's research on the effects of alcohol and sleep if you want to have a clearer picture.
>my wife and I will surely share a bottle of wine tonight at dinner
For example, many people will have found wives because of alcohol, which acts as a 'social lubricant'. Having a wife is good for one's health, etc.
I'm really curious how this is obvious and how you know it. Anything is literally poison if consume too much of it. Even water [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Do we really need to compare deaths and injuries from self-inflicted water intoxication to that of alchohol?
"X isn't bad because literally anything can be bad in some scenario! If you eat too many bean sprouts you'll choke and die, so it must be fine to eat arsenic, right??"
Faulty logic. Practically everything can be a poison. The poison is the dose. There is no argument that heavy alcohol use is detrimental to your health. There is still quite a bit of argument whether or not moderate alcohol use has benefits. And where are the benefits? Does it benefit the human as a whole as in- the benefits in one area (anti coagulant, anti inflammatory) outweigh the additional risks of (throat cancer, breast cancer)?
Doesn't seem obvious to me. You should conduct a study where you simply proclaim things as obvious.
The Earth is obviously flat, just look at it. /s
Moderatee alcohol use can have small benefits on certain diseases, but overall mortality seems have no such connection.
Until those studies have been going on for decades, with counter studies, and criticism, etc, and end up part of conventional 101 university curriculum, any individual study (even meta-study, also shoddily done more often than not) is not worth the paper they are printed on for the average reader.
Alternatively, quote a rogue authority, like Feynman:
"A committee is twelve people doing the work of one".
Between the state of conflicting information in epidemiology, the replication crisis in science in general, self reporting methodology, publication bias, etc . . . there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. That’s not even a remark on the findings; even if the findings were the opposite, all these undermining factors would remain.
Well, yes, but only in people with a similar genetic background. Using this as a kind of instrumental variable assumes an additive or linear model of genome environment interactions which is about as realistic as a flat Earth model. It may be that this study is being oversold.
Here are two recent studies on the topic.
[1] Alcohol consumption and risk of gallstone disease: a meta-analysis.
Wang J, et al. Eur J Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2017.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/27926662/
"A linear dose-response relationship was found between alcohol consumption and gallstone disease risk and the risk of gallstone disease decreased by 12% (RR=0.88, 95% CI: 0.84-0.92; Pnonlinearity=0.079) for each 10 g/day increment in alcohol consumption. This meta-analysis suggests that alcohol consumption is associated with significantly decreased risk of gallstone disease."
[2] Alcohol Consumption Can Reduce the Risk of Gallstone Disease: A Systematic Review with a Dose-Response Meta-Analysis of Case-Control and Cohort Studies.
Cha BH, et al. Gut Liver. 2019.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30665280/?i=6&from=/27...
"In this systematic review with meta-analysis, alcohol consumption could decrease the risk of GSD, and the dose-response analysis revealed a dose-dependent linear risk reduction and a weakened linear trend between alcohol consumption levels less than and greater than 28 g/day."
That seems like a pretty big flaw in the study, no?
> This [..] study [..] focused on people of East Asian descent, many of whom have genetic variants that limit alcohol tolerance. > Because the variants have specific and large effects on alcohol, but do not effect other lifestyle factors such as diet, smoking, economic status or education, they can be used by scientists to nail down causal effects of alcohol intake
and
> The research team - including scientists from Oxford and Peking universities and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said it would be impossible to do a study of this kind in Western populations, since almost no-one there has the relevant alcohol-intolerance gene variants.
it's the base pillar of their study..