> They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury.
> But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day.
So 914 vs 918 out of 100,000? That's gotta be below statistical significance.
Journalists are often not great at understanding statistics. That is how we got so many misleading news.
914 to 918 per 100,000 is a tiny change. It might be caused by subtle differences in the two groups that have nothing to do with alcohol. If anything, the study shows that having <= 1 drink a day is basically the same as being a teetotaler.
Two drinks a day, OTOH, are visibly worse for health (914 to 977).
Just saying it's a tiny change because "it feels that way" doesn't make it so. When ranting against misleading news, I think your approach of argument from assertiveness is slightly dishonest.
A bit more rigorous would be to compare maybe the Beta distribution with a=915 to a=919 and b=100,000 in both cases. Or Poisson distributions with lambda 914/100,000 and 918/100,000.
I don't know whether Beta or Poisson are better fits. I don't even know how I'd find out.
Abd of course, that's still a fairly handwavy approach and I'd love for someone to show me how it's done for real.
But just saying it's noise without quantifying it seems to me exactly as misleading and irresponsible as the original news, only biased in the other direction.
In case of humans and health, the biggest variable is age. Biological aging is strongly connected to higher risk of serious diseases. (See Makeham-Gompertz law; this is the Gompertz component.) If you have groups of 100 000 people, but there are just a few slightly older people in the other group, the incidence of age-related diseases is expected to be higher.
Then there are subtle things such as "how many people in group A vs group B live next to a motorway or suffer from higher levels of ambient noise". Not to mention the cultural differences (religious fasting or absence thereof etc.)
Picking up huge groups of people that are perfectly equivalent is very, very hard.
But I am not a professional either. I studied algebra, not statistics, we only had a year-long course in the basics. Maybe I was too handwavy.
> Journalists are often not great at understanding statistics.
Perhaps, as comrade Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
You're probably not, but the way you phrased this suggests you might be confusing statistical significance with effect size.
You can reject a null hypothesis with statistical significance even if the effect size of the alternate hypothesis is small -- you just need a big sample.
Using a simple t-test calculation and assuming normal distribution and an equal split in both groups, the sample size per group needs to be 20 million to be in the 90% confidence interval. It's not even yet in the 95% interval at that point. You reach the "scientific default" 95% confidence at 40million per group (that's 80million total).
At a sample size of 20million that's 182.800 cases in the non-alcoholic group and 183.600 in the alcoholic once a day group. At that scale I wouldn't trust my data enough to believe the reporting of once-a-day and not-at-all is actually accurate and other completly unrelated unaccounted effects do not outweigh my testesd criteria.
If I haven't done any major errors calculating this (which might be, because it's back of the napkin math with a t-test calculator or my assumptions are wrong), I doubt the sample size and accuracy of the measure is high enough to make a statistical significant claim about these groups.
Even if it actually is a somewhat accurate result, it means having one drink per day increases health issues by as little as 0.5%. The risk of addicition and starting to drink much more probably heavily outweighs that.
Regarding OPs statement, I think it's fair to assume what is usually meant is "that has to be statistically insignificant for any sample size this sutdy probably had".
Depends what you are trying to show. What it does show is that they didn't find any health benefits from drinking a glass a day, which was something lots of other studies where purporting to find around that time.
The actual conclusion from the actual paper is "the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero"
There are injuries and health problems typically associated with alcohol that were studied, but they aren’t exclusively associated with alcohol, and have some base rate in the non-drinking population; to understand the impact of drinking, you need to account for that base rate when comparing the numbers from drinkers.
for a while. Alcohol is a mutagen (and so is its metabolite, acetaldehyde) and it particularly increases the risk of cancer of tissue it comes into direct contact with. Esophageal, oral cavity, stomach and liver.
What's also not clear from the article is whether they controlled for other factors. People who average five drinks a day almost certainly have lives that are messed up in other ways. Did they have more cancer because they drank more, or did the thing that caused them to have cancer also cause them to drink more?
Yes. A 0.4% increase in health problems is what most people would consider "basically safe". How does that compare to effects from other bad dietary habits many people have. For instance:
This. I drink a glass of wine maybe once every 2 months. Would i be better off just drinking water? Sure, but the difference isnt big enough to change it
It is all about whether the health benefits of polyphenols override the harm of drinking something that is essentially a degreaser. All mammalian cell walls are made of lipids, after all...
Yeah, 7 drinks a week is actually rather heavy... I suppose this research is going against the idea that one glass of wine per day is healthy, and the BBC had to give it a clickbait headline?
Plus, I'm not actually super concerned about my chances of disease rising from 914/100000 to 918/100000 over my life?
To be honest, this actually seems quite low. Most self-tests would classify you as an alcoholic for drinking every day; it's quite surprising to me that the difference is only 0.004%
> It’s totally bizarre that the article seems to regard “one drink per day” as some kind of minimum. Lots of us drink far less than that!
Yeah, that was my thought as well. I would assume correct baseline to be "two drinks at Friday evening every week or two". In fact, correct article title would to be "No stage of _alcoholism_ is safe, global study finds".
I think it's worth noting the context for this article - which a lot of people have missed. This study was performed when there was quite a lot of reporting on "one glass of red-wine a day", as being healthy and an important source of antioxidants. This is no longer believed to be true, but was (and is still) widely believed.
And yet the study talks about "alcohol related illness like cancer or other injury" (which kind of injury btw? a car accident?) and admits "moderate drinking may protect against heart disease". I need a citation for the "heart protection vs other disease".
Hey, I'm 100% confident that heavy drinking is bad. But very moderate drinking (like, one glass of wine per day, when having dinner), for what I can see, seems to be correlated with moderate people that can limit themselves and yet it helps relaxing, de-stressing, having a chat. All those things are good for somebody's overall mood and health. Stress is bad.
Alcohol is an addictive drug. Sure, if you have one drink a day it MIGHT relax you. But you also run the real risk of becoming an alcoholic and dying. Given that alcohol kills so many people, it doesn't seem worth the risk.
I'm not a medical researcher, so what exactly I would call it isn't too important. But you could describe the fibrosis which leads to cirrhosis as a direct "injury" from alcohol use.
"The Global Burden of Disease study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK', between 1990 and 2016."
I don't know of a global mindset when it comes to drinking alcohol/wine that ranged between 1990 and 2016?
TL;DR: incidence of the observed correlated health problem per 100,000 people:
- Non-drinkers: 914
- 1 drink/day: 918
- 2 drinks/day: 977
- 5 drinks/day: 1252
Now, it would seem to me that the data is in slight contradiction with the assertion. Unless you're an heavy drinker (5 drinks/day as an average seems quite an high consumption to me. Maybe it can happen 15 days a year during vacation, but I'd consider that kind of usage "addiction" otherwise) your increased chance to develop such disease is quite low.
Even 1252/100000... That means that straight up being an alcoholic elevates your risk from 0.94% to 1.25%. I would never have expected alcoholism to be so safe. I could totally see someone make the decision to accept a 0.3 percentage point increase in risk.
A lot of critical commentary on this, which is understandable, but the study does at least go against the notion that a drink a day promotes general good health (which I have heard quite often).
As has been previously discussed on HN [0], alcohol (in moderation) can be advantageous for your social live. Given that a healthy social live is good for your mental health which, in turn, affects your physical health, looking for only alcohol-induced problems might not give the full picture. That's not to say that alcohol isn't bad for you, it is. But it's a bit of a pick-your-poison-situation, IMO.
Also, the drinking group drank >= 1 drink per day. I don't think you can take a baseline that would classify as alcoholic behaviour on most tests and still say there's no safe limit.
> As has been previously discussed on HN [0], alcohol (in moderation) can be advantageous for your social live.
Long ago, cigarette smoking was seen as advantageous for your social life. Even now, with alcohol, a lot of the big companies are trying hard to make alcohol much less a part of business and corporate culture.
Good point. I actually agree that our culture around alcohol is a bit unhealthy; I tried to avoid excusing this behaviour by pointing the bad sides out.
That being said, given the amount of problems the reporting has [0], it probably works the wrong way around: People take away that drinking increases their disease chance by 0.004% and think everything is fine; just have a look at the other comments in this thread.
[0] I'll assume the original study did not claim that there's no safe level, since I can't verify it
And I'm sure it was. While disaster for my health I met many great people. Much easier for me to start a conversation when I went to the smoking corner, asked for lighter etc. Guess it still for didn't weight up the downsides but everything has both sides of the coin.
> Even now, with alcohol, a lot of the big companies are trying hard to make alcohol much less a part of business and corporate culture.
You mean going for a drink after work, right? Because I haven't heard of many places where alcohol is a part of corporate culture. During normal business meetings it's usually a taboo to have a drink during the day - unless, say, you're in Italy/France and drink wine to accompany the meal. But in many places of the world the smell of alcohol at work can have you fired immediately.
Yes, or at least these are the effects I see. Showing up drunk for work is a no-go, but when going out with colleagues after work or on company parties, having a drink together is very common. Unfortunately, that is where a lot of networking happens; being part of the in-group by sharing a drink will often go a long way. That being said, if you're open enough to join anyway, you can probably get away with not drinking (at least that's my experience in Germany).
Actual social skills. We just assume people learn them - somehow. We need to explicitly teach these skills, starting in primary school. We can also start teaching people about different personality types and how they best interact with one another. What we don't need is alcohol. Alcohol, specifically scotch & bourbon for me, is something I prefer to savor - not use for "social lubricant."
It's not that socializing norms revolve around alcohol. It is that alcohol is one popular, amongst others, medium for socializing (because it's enjoyable, because it relaxes, etc. not for everyone, but for enough people).
But, as in everything, "a bit" is good enough, excess spoils it (edit for the obvious generality that is: actually, "a bit" can be bad enough, it's not "as in everything").
The problem is more when one thing (alcohol, cigarette, coffee, etc.) is considered as being _the_ required medium (happens also at work, when informal coffee/smoking breaks become the actual decision moments and you have to abide by it or you're out).
Medical reporting should give us accurate information on medical risks.
But for the way I live my life, it is only one of the factors influencing my decisions. Practically, cumulative life happiness is what these kinds of personal decisions should come down to.
They probably mean "units" rather than drinks, and quite a lot of standard measures - glass of wine, pint of beer - are two units. It implies habit, such as having a drink when you come home from work and then maybe another one later, plus partying at the weekend, which easily adds up to those averages.
Quite a lot of people drink a lot in a way that's mostly invisible.
I hope it is OK to use a throwaway for this kind of comment, but I am not comfortable talking about my alcoholism (I am nearing 1 year sober though) with a username that can be linked to me real world identity.
That said..you don't go straight from not drinking to 8 drinks a day. The habit usually starts slow and builds up.
For me it was:
- One beer after work is OK. Some say even good for your health. I need to unwind.
- Hey, I worked very hard today. I deserve two today.
(fast forward ~2 years, drinking two beers on average every day)
- It's not drinking if you drink craft beers. It's being a beer connoisseur. And those can drink a lot, because, err, there's a lot of fancy IPAs to try. It's also not drinking if you "like" that beer on beeradvocate.
- There are also bourbon connoisseurs! Let's also try drinking bourboun! No need to cut down on the beer though.
(fast forward another ~2 years to drinking a bottle of bourboun a week and 4 beers a night..)
So to answer your question, it took me about ~4 years to go from what would some consider to be even good for your health to drinking like a pro. Without anyone noticing.
Working in tech also makes it easy to hide the habit. Nobody will bat an eye if you turn up for work at 11 as long as you deliver. You can also "WFH" if you have a particularly bad hangover.
I'm so glad I quit and the damage I did to my body seems mostly reversible. Shout out to the /r/stopdrinking subreddit.
Reminds me of a manager I had in a nightclub I bar tended at as a student. He didn't drink he said. Probably smashed about 10-20 shots a night though but because they were only shots he didn't count them as drinking. People will go to great lengths to justify their bad habits.
The standard beer here in Germany is 0.5l at ~5% alcohol content, which comes down to 2 1/2 standard drinks. And it isn't unusual to drink 2-3 of those.
The problem arises when this goes from an occasion (meeting with friends) to become a regular thing.
The body and mind also becomes much more resilient to alcohol as you drink regularly. During my early 20s when we went out to bars a lot, it was normal to drink 4 large beers and feel tipsy, not drunk.
I try my best to avoid alcohol. The challenge is, I like that it changes my state of mind, and maybe too much. Logically I know the resulting anxiety and negative health effects are just not worth it, but addiction is not logical.
None of my business but I suggest partaking in making your own,going to a sommelier course or experience a wine tasting ( possibly close to a production location).
In my opinion creating your own poison helps one understand its virtues
Studies like this and the subsequent stupid fear-mongering and risk aversion is how we get people afraid to take a vaccine that's 100x less dangerous than the disease it's preventing
- Non-drinkers: 914
- 1 drink/day: 918
Of course it depends on p-value but a "risk" like that is pretty close to be a measuring error.
One of the claims the paper was investigating was that 1 drink a day was better for you than zero drinks a day, and for that they found no evidence. They're not saying that a drink a day is significantly worse than not drinking.
It looks like 0 or 1 drink a day is basically the same from a health perspective. Our bodies are designed to filter out unwanted foreign substances and will work well if we don't overload it.
It seems that 2 drinks a day is still a tiny risk factor. I say this as a <1 drink per day person. So instead of the fear-mongering headline, I could easily see something like "2 drinks a day has very little significant negative impact on general health" or "non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns".
"non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns"
Except that is almost certainly not true and not backed up by this study. The study set out to find the number of daily drinks of alcohol that minimizes health risks, and found that that number is zero. What the paper states is that increasing your alcohol consumption will never lower your health risks.
Agreed. I think the distinction being made here is that it is whether it is an "unwanted foreign substance" at all. Some of the prevailing wisdom this article is countering portrays alcohol like vitamins (desirable and beneficial in safe amounts), rather than like high fructose corn syrup (undesirable in any amount but tolerable in small amounts).
Does this factor in that quite a few "non-drinkers" will be ex-alcoholics in recovery? Drinking in the UK is really prevalent, especially over the last few decades, although it's apparently in decline for young adults nowadays.
For better context, the baseline "illness rate" was 914/100,000 which is a 0.914% chance of illness per year. The "one drink a _day_" group increases that to 918/100,000 for a risk of 0.918%. Yes, the consequences are 0.004% (or 4e-05 probability) increase in risk from drinking _daily_. It's almost like they had to goose the results and drop out "1-2 drinks a week" groups to get positive results.
The result they where considering was if 1 drink a day was 'healthier' than 0, and for that they found no evidence. That was the result they published, not that 1 drink was more 'dangerous' than zero but that the number of drinks pr day that minimizes health risk is 0.
Stating a percentage increase that is calculated by subtraction rather than division is nearly always misleading. The increase in risk is 0.43%, which is still low but two orders of magnitute higher than your statement. What you are calculating is the increase in percentage points [1]
When dealing with relatively low probabilities (<0.5%), I prefer the percentage points as they give better context. That context being the overall risk to my life or health on an intuitive human level. For example, one medication I take “doubles my risk of some cancer” (over some ill defined period). That sounds terrible until you take the percentage points and realize it’s still less than a rounding error (or risk from driving in the USA) and therefore its easier to decide if the benefits outweigh the “doubled risk of xyz cancer”. From a policy decision perspective or for larger risks (>0.5%) the normal risk may be better.
My main point is that you should clearly state it as percentage points if that's what you're calculating and want to express. That includes not using the percentage sign and indicating that these are percentage points. An increase in percent is without context interpreted as a relative increase not an absolute.
Both statements have merit. If my risk of getting cancer per year is 1% rather than 0.5%, knowing this is 100% higher is useful. This is not a 1% chance in total but per year. For context, if we simplify this to a binomial distribution for a 20 year old with 60 more years to live (i.e. we calculate for each year getting cancer=p), the lifespan chance of getting cancer increases from 26% to 45%.
Also the probability of the event is actually around 1% here (around 1000 in 100000), so higher than the 0.5% you mentioned.
To my mind both your point and the point you're replying to have merit.
Saying "your chances of x have doubled" is flawed because that relies on knowing the probability of x.
Saying "The risk of x happening is n% per day" (or an increase of n) is flawed because daily risks aren't what people care about - it's lifetime risk.
So ideally the information should be phrased as something like "this increases the chance of the thing from x% to y% over an average lifetime." And then the footnotes can give deeper context.
Thanks, both of you make good points. It probably would help if I called it "absolute" or "total risk" increase as that clarifies it. Of course stats is generally difficult for these vary reasons.
> So ideally the information should be phrased as something like "this increases the chance of the thing from x% to y% over an average lifetime."
I've personally never seen medicine info sheets give probabilities much less lifetime risks.
> For context, if we simplify this to a binomial distribution for a 20 year old with 60 more years to live (i.e. we calculate for each year getting cancer=p), the lifespan chance of getting cancer increases from 26% to 45%.
That would be more useful as well.
> Also the probability of the event is actually around 1% here (around 1000 in 100000), so higher than the 0.5% you mentioned.
It's really a rule of thumb for small values. In this case, I was interested in understanding the "4 extra people out of 100,000" as the article reports it (which is well below my 0.5% guideline) and not the baseline risk of illness per year. Ideally one compares both total and relative risks profiles. I'll be careful to add total risk vs relative risk to my descriptions in the future as that helps distinguish them.
Freshman year of college I drank like a fish. That was enough. I have been a teetotaler ever since and am rewarded with an amazing memory and a fully functioning brain many years later.
Alcohol is a poison. I always knew there was no safe level.
The biggest flaw in this report is that it doesn't say what classifies as a non-drinker!? It seems to imply that anyone who drinks 1 or more units of alcohol day is a drinker, so that was suggest anything less has no demonstratable negative effects.
These kinds of studies are usually based self-reporting via questionnaires, so the data is going to be wildly inaccurate. Any small correlation is in the data is probably meaningless. The other problem is that the risks of consuming alcohol are different for each person. Failing to take someone's diet into account also invalidates the results.
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[ 13.9 ms ] story [ 1337 ms ] threadThat sentence is ... what? How do you suffer alcohol related injury without drinking?
So 914 vs 918 out of 100,000? That's gotta be below statistical significance.
914 to 918 per 100,000 is a tiny change. It might be caused by subtle differences in the two groups that have nothing to do with alcohol. If anything, the study shows that having <= 1 drink a day is basically the same as being a teetotaler.
Two drinks a day, OTOH, are visibly worse for health (914 to 977).
A bit more rigorous would be to compare maybe the Beta distribution with a=915 to a=919 and b=100,000 in both cases. Or Poisson distributions with lambda 914/100,000 and 918/100,000.
I don't know whether Beta or Poisson are better fits. I don't even know how I'd find out.
Abd of course, that's still a fairly handwavy approach and I'd love for someone to show me how it's done for real.
But just saying it's noise without quantifying it seems to me exactly as misleading and irresponsible as the original news, only biased in the other direction.
Then there are subtle things such as "how many people in group A vs group B live next to a motorway or suffer from higher levels of ambient noise". Not to mention the cultural differences (religious fasting or absence thereof etc.)
Picking up huge groups of people that are perfectly equivalent is very, very hard.
But I am not a professional either. I studied algebra, not statistics, we only had a year-long course in the basics. Maybe I was too handwavy.
Perhaps, as comrade Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
You can reject a null hypothesis with statistical significance even if the effect size of the alternate hypothesis is small -- you just need a big sample.
At a sample size of 20million that's 182.800 cases in the non-alcoholic group and 183.600 in the alcoholic once a day group. At that scale I wouldn't trust my data enough to believe the reporting of once-a-day and not-at-all is actually accurate and other completly unrelated unaccounted effects do not outweigh my testesd criteria.
If I haven't done any major errors calculating this (which might be, because it's back of the napkin math with a t-test calculator or my assumptions are wrong), I doubt the sample size and accuracy of the measure is high enough to make a statistical significant claim about these groups.
Even if it actually is a somewhat accurate result, it means having one drink per day increases health issues by as little as 0.5%. The risk of addicition and starting to drink much more probably heavily outweighs that.
Regarding OPs statement, I think it's fair to assume what is usually meant is "that has to be statistically insignificant for any sample size this sutdy probably had".
The actual conclusion from the actual paper is "the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero"
I’ll take my downvotes now.
> But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day.
The headline is typical for this kind of health reporting.
"X is not safe at any level" is like arguing about the slope of a curve without discussing it's baseline or scale.
Since when alcohol consumption is accepted as a direct (not a risk factor, but directly responsible of) cause of cancer?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
* eating fast food once or twice a week
* eating processed meat a few times a week
* eating refined sugar
Plus, I'm not actually super concerned about my chances of disease rising from 914/100000 to 918/100000 over my life?
Yeah, that was my thought as well. I would assume correct baseline to be "two drinks at Friday evening every week or two". In fact, correct article title would to be "No stage of _alcoholism_ is safe, global study finds".
Hey, I'm 100% confident that heavy drinking is bad. But very moderate drinking (like, one glass of wine per day, when having dinner), for what I can see, seems to be correlated with moderate people that can limit themselves and yet it helps relaxing, de-stressing, having a chat. All those things are good for somebody's overall mood and health. Stress is bad.
Everything IMHO. I'm not an MD or an expert.
Where I live almost everybody drinks, moderately. And yet very, very few people become an alcoholic.
Probably the most common non-cancerous injury from alcohol is cirrhosis of the liver.
"The Global Burden of Disease study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK', between 1990 and 2016."
I don't know of a global mindset when it comes to drinking alcohol/wine that ranged between 1990 and 2016?
(the last sentence of the article)
- Non-drinkers: 914
- 1 drink/day: 918
- 2 drinks/day: 977
- 5 drinks/day: 1252
Now, it would seem to me that the data is in slight contradiction with the assertion. Unless you're an heavy drinker (5 drinks/day as an average seems quite an high consumption to me. Maybe it can happen 15 days a year during vacation, but I'd consider that kind of usage "addiction" otherwise) your increased chance to develop such disease is quite low.
Also, the drinking group drank >= 1 drink per day. I don't think you can take a baseline that would classify as alcoholic behaviour on most tests and still say there's no safe limit.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21884981
Long ago, cigarette smoking was seen as advantageous for your social life. Even now, with alcohol, a lot of the big companies are trying hard to make alcohol much less a part of business and corporate culture.
That being said, given the amount of problems the reporting has [0], it probably works the wrong way around: People take away that drinking increases their disease chance by 0.004% and think everything is fine; just have a look at the other comments in this thread.
[0] I'll assume the original study did not claim that there's no safe level, since I can't verify it
You mean going for a drink after work, right? Because I haven't heard of many places where alcohol is a part of corporate culture. During normal business meetings it's usually a taboo to have a drink during the day - unless, say, you're in Italy/France and drink wine to accompany the meal. But in many places of the world the smell of alcohol at work can have you fired immediately.
Yes, or at least these are the effects I see. Showing up drunk for work is a no-go, but when going out with colleagues after work or on company parties, having a drink together is very common. Unfortunately, that is where a lot of networking happens; being part of the in-group by sharing a drink will often go a long way. That being said, if you're open enough to join anyway, you can probably get away with not drinking (at least that's my experience in Germany).
I mean, perhaps walks in parks, picnics, back-yard food spreads, and what not.
But, as in everything, "a bit" is good enough, excess spoils it (edit for the obvious generality that is: actually, "a bit" can be bad enough, it's not "as in everything").
The problem is more when one thing (alcohol, cigarette, coffee, etc.) is considered as being _the_ required medium (happens also at work, when informal coffee/smoking breaks become the actual decision moments and you have to abide by it or you're out).
That's disingenuous no? In other cultures, socialization revolves around drinking tea or coffee, substances that are not harmful to your body.
But for the way I live my life, it is only one of the factors influencing my decisions. Practically, cumulative life happiness is what these kinds of personal decisions should come down to.
Quite a lot of people drink a lot in a way that's mostly invisible.
That said..you don't go straight from not drinking to 8 drinks a day. The habit usually starts slow and builds up.
For me it was:
- One beer after work is OK. Some say even good for your health. I need to unwind.
- Hey, I worked very hard today. I deserve two today.
(fast forward ~2 years, drinking two beers on average every day)
- It's not drinking if you drink craft beers. It's being a beer connoisseur. And those can drink a lot, because, err, there's a lot of fancy IPAs to try. It's also not drinking if you "like" that beer on beeradvocate.
- There are also bourbon connoisseurs! Let's also try drinking bourboun! No need to cut down on the beer though.
(fast forward another ~2 years to drinking a bottle of bourboun a week and 4 beers a night..)
So to answer your question, it took me about ~4 years to go from what would some consider to be even good for your health to drinking like a pro. Without anyone noticing.
Working in tech also makes it easy to hide the habit. Nobody will bat an eye if you turn up for work at 11 as long as you deliver. You can also "WFH" if you have a particularly bad hangover.
I'm so glad I quit and the damage I did to my body seems mostly reversible. Shout out to the /r/stopdrinking subreddit.
The problem arises when this goes from an occasion (meeting with friends) to become a regular thing.
The body and mind also becomes much more resilient to alcohol as you drink regularly. During my early 20s when we went out to bars a lot, it was normal to drink 4 large beers and feel tipsy, not drunk.
In my opinion creating your own poison helps one understand its virtues
- Non-drinkers: 914
- 1 drink/day: 918
Of course it depends on p-value but a "risk" like that is pretty close to be a measuring error.
I think I'll take the risk, thanks
Except that is almost certainly not true and not backed up by this study. The study set out to find the number of daily drinks of alcohol that minimizes health risks, and found that that number is zero. What the paper states is that increasing your alcohol consumption will never lower your health risks.
A year? What kind of conditions can develop from light alcohol consumption like that?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point
Both statements have merit. If my risk of getting cancer per year is 1% rather than 0.5%, knowing this is 100% higher is useful. This is not a 1% chance in total but per year. For context, if we simplify this to a binomial distribution for a 20 year old with 60 more years to live (i.e. we calculate for each year getting cancer=p), the lifespan chance of getting cancer increases from 26% to 45%.
Also the probability of the event is actually around 1% here (around 1000 in 100000), so higher than the 0.5% you mentioned.
Saying "your chances of x have doubled" is flawed because that relies on knowing the probability of x.
Saying "The risk of x happening is n% per day" (or an increase of n) is flawed because daily risks aren't what people care about - it's lifetime risk.
So ideally the information should be phrased as something like "this increases the chance of the thing from x% to y% over an average lifetime." And then the footnotes can give deeper context.
> So ideally the information should be phrased as something like "this increases the chance of the thing from x% to y% over an average lifetime."
I've personally never seen medicine info sheets give probabilities much less lifetime risks.
> For context, if we simplify this to a binomial distribution for a 20 year old with 60 more years to live (i.e. we calculate for each year getting cancer=p), the lifespan chance of getting cancer increases from 26% to 45%.
That would be more useful as well.
> Also the probability of the event is actually around 1% here (around 1000 in 100000), so higher than the 0.5% you mentioned.
It's really a rule of thumb for small values. In this case, I was interested in understanding the "4 extra people out of 100,000" as the article reports it (which is well below my 0.5% guideline) and not the baseline risk of illness per year. Ideally one compares both total and relative risks profiles. I'll be careful to add total risk vs relative risk to my descriptions in the future as that helps distinguish them.
Yeah guys, alcohol is a poison for your body and it treats it as such, this shouldn't be such news.
Alcohol is a poison. I always knew there was no safe level.
Prohibition has historically been popular particularly in the USA, although I think it was driven by moral panic.
These kinds of studies are usually based self-reporting via questionnaires, so the data is going to be wildly inaccurate. Any small correlation is in the data is probably meaningless. The other problem is that the risks of consuming alcohol are different for each person. Failing to take someone's diet into account also invalidates the results.