The article briefly mentions RHR (resting heart rate) also. Anecdotally of course, but I notice my RHR being ~5 - 8 bpm lower when I abstain from alcohol for a few days.
I have worn a Garmin watch with HR monitor for months at a time off and on for the last few years.
My resting heart rate while sleeping is typically 64-68 without alcohol and 65-85 after drinking several glasses of wine. There is such a marked difference in RHR in the two scenarios that you could tell if I drank simply by looking at my heart rate chart during the night.
Interestingly, I attempted to start running for one month about a year ago. My endurance is poor, but I would run/walk for several kilometers. Within the first week and continuing through that month, my RHR while sleeping was 52-62. Not only was it significantly lower, it took a long time after stopping exercise for the rate to return to what it usually is.
I don't know what this all really means, but it is fascinating. Studies or not, I imagine that not drinking + regular cardio exercise is better for long life than the alternative combinations.
be careful of the inverse inference though. a rhr in the 40s doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in good health. a low rhr could indicate a myriad of other cardiovascular issues (something of a personal concern for me).
but contrary to the article, an evening whiskey ~3 times a week (in my experience) seems to be optimal for delivering antiseptic benefits with few/no downsides.
It just means you're out of shape and as you get into shape your HR reflects it. I saw similar after "summer of covid" and now getting back to running every day and limiting alcohol to once a week.
Yup, I also noticed this. I wore a pulse oximeter every night which measures your heart rate, and it jumped from around 60 to 80 just because of alcohol one night. Crazy!
That was the biggest effect I saw by far, more than all the sleep apnea variables I was trying to measure!
Granted I don't drink often, and metabolize alcohol poorly, but still that's a huge difference.
FWIW I'm not out of shape; I commuted 1h / day by bike for over a decade, and was a medically normal weight, which is maybe 20-30th percentile in the population.
I also wear a Garmin watch with HR monitor. Having a couple glasses of wine with dinner doesn't seem to noticeably change my RHR while sleeping. There are probably differences between individuals.
An RHR that gets into the 85 range could indicate a cardiac problem. Might want to get that checked.
I am fortunate enough to live in a country where we only had a lockdown for about 4 weeks of 2020, and during that time I didn't drink. See if you can see from my sleeping heart rate when that was: https://i.imgur.com/7VlYQ67.png
You appear to be demonstrating the opposite of what is claimed here: your heart-rate variability seems to have decreased when you were not drinking alcohol.
When I went back to the article to check this, however, I saw that, while the text says that alchohol has "a negative effect on HRV", and their model explains this, the diagram shows alcohol increasing the HRV. As the text's version of the observed results and its explanation for them are consistent, I assume the diagram is incorrectly labelled.
Update: Thanks to everyone for correcting me on what HRV means here.
HRV is not a measure of change in your resting heart rate over time, its a measure of the difference on a per beat basis. Even if your BPM is 60, your heart doesn't beat exactly once a second, it will actually vary in length by some number of milliseconds back and forth. This is what is measured when talking about HRV.
It is believed to occur as the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system "fight" over raising and lowering the heartrate. The symbiosis between them lands on a steady rate per minute with fluctuations on a per beat basis.
Heart rate variability really does not mean variability in heart rate (such as is shown on the graph linked) it is more at the 50-100ms level in change in timing between hear beats. The graph does seem to show a reduction in RHR but does not address HRV (as I understand it)
I’ve been largely alcohol free since the new year. Prior to that I thought alcohol helped me rest. Now even one or two glasses of beer or wine messes up my sleep. The contrast helps me understand it better. Of course this anecdote shouldn’t be construed as robust data....
I've been working on switching most drinking for weed—for health reasons. Seriously. It's the best and lowest-side-effect sleep aid I've used. Hopefully it's not secretly doing horrible things to me, but my sleep quality's been amazing since I started to take a little a couple nights a week. Most consistently-decent sleep of my life.
Damnit. Well, it's that or lots of 5-6 hour nights, or worse. Or bad hangovers and other weird shit from sleeping pills. Maybe time to get a sleep-tracker watch.
Do you drink a lot of coffee or other caffeinated drinks, especially later in the day? I used to think caffeine didn't have much affect on my sleep, until I cut it out. Old habits die hard, but I just drink decaf coffee now and am getting better sleep then I can remember.
~2 cups of coffee probably 5-6 days a week, sometimes tea instead, rarely past noon and never past ~2:00PM (I only drink it as late as, say, 1:00PM if I happen not to realize how late it is). Maybe one soda per month, tops, don't really pay attention to when I have those, though. I'd guess afternoon/evening mostly, but it's rare enough that I doubt it's doing anything meaningful to my overall sleep-trends.
I could try cutting it out, but I've had trouble falling asleep my entire life, and my average annual caffeine intake was very low until my mid-teens. I'm actually much better about sleep now than I used to be, even without meds. Worth a shot, though, I guess. I'd been thinking about dropping my intake to one cup per day, alternating coffee and green tea (which would represent a large increase in my consumption of green tea) anyway. Hell, at lower volume I could justify buying the expensive, low-package-weight, really, really good beans, so the flavor of the coffee I'm drinking would improve, though I might have to group coffee-days rather than alternate them, to avoid issues with beans going stale. Seems like ~halving my caffeine would be an OK start.
Sigh. Guess I'm going to be spending a lot of money on sparkling water, just like when I kicked my soda habit :-)
You're also inhibiting your ability to dream (and your ability to remember them). That is a lot of critical emotional processing not happening. Dreams matter, even if they don't make rational sense.
I've had a similar experience. I've been using delta-8 at night for sleep and I've added 1-2 hrs a night according to my fitbit. I don't feel "hungover" or similar like I would from alcohol or OTC sleeping meds.
However, a more critical review[0] of the epidemiological data that took into account genetic variants which impact the effect of alcohol intake on longevity shows that the described J-shaped relationship is not as robust as once thought. In conclusion the review simply states:
The optimal level of alcohol intake for health and longevity is zero
Epidemiology strikes again! I watch a lot of videos on nutrition and researchers often say that randomized control trials are too expensive so we need to rely on epidemiology despite its flaws.
What I find crazy is that nations around the world collaborate and spend billions of dollars building a particle accelerator and yet we can't seem to find money to research something that affects every human every day of their lives.
I guess that is because particles in the accelerator are not alive, so you can accelerate anyway you want. Do you really want to round up a group of seniors and gives them different doses of alcohol and see how much you can accelerate their demise?
That's a strawman, a randomized control trial does not have to be dangerous. In fact, we already do randomized control trials, they are just expensive and uncommon.
It's not just a money issue. It would be impractical and unethical to confine study subjects in controlled environments for long periods of time. That's what we would have to do in order to gather reliable data and eliminate confounding factors.
Most human nutrition studies are only observational and barely a step above junk science. Don't take them too seriously.
I'm not so confident RCTs of nutrition are unethical. The data are too damn valuable for society to ignore. Perhaps participants could be informed and willing to partake in the challenge trials, which although these participants might not be reflective of the overall population, we can get a better sense than correlational studies.
Humans are incredible explorers, self-sacrificing for the greater (perceived) good. We should consider continuing our legacy by understanding ourselves better through rigorous science. (And hopefully end the historical legacy of making thousands of other species extinct via our exploration.)
Randomized control trials are done all the time. They can and are done ethically. I don't know where you people are getting the idea that RCTs are unethical.
Proper large scale, long term RCTs have almost never been done in the human nutrition field. In order to really get the "controlled" part of an RCT the researchers have to confine people somewhere that all of their food and beverage intake can be accurately counted. Obviously this is very expensive and researchers can't ethically confine people in controlled environments for years. At most those studies have been done with very small subject counts for a few months at a time: hardly sufficient to obtain reliable results.
So as a practical matter most studies tend to rely on subject reported data, which is notoriously inaccurate. People forget to record little snacks, or don't weigh their portions, or lie about their behavior because they're ashamed.
You're totally missing the point. If the study relies on subject reported data then there's no proper control regardless of number of subjects. More funding won't fix that quality problem.
What other method is there to gather nutritional data? The researchers either have to confine and monitor the subjects in a controlled environment, or leave them loose and rely on subject reported data. Maybe someday we'll have better technical solutions but for now those are the only practical options.
If you have a better approach for study design then I'm sure nutrition researchers would love to hear it.
Yes, to do a proper RCT you need to confine and monitor subjects in a controlled environment. YOU used the word "years" and nobody ever suggested a study that long. If you're implying that you need a study that long to gather meaningful results then that's just simply not true.
Let me put this plainly, you can design RCTs that are:
A) Safe for participants.
B) Aren't too long.
C) Don't rely on subject reported data.
D) Still give meaningful results.
These are not mutually exclusive and they are done all the time. These are gold-standard experiments in the nutrition field.
Like you said, they are expensive to do and usually only have a small number of subjects. That's why I'm suggesting that wealthy governments should collaborate to fund massive-scale trials at maximum quality.
In the general case "B" and "D" are mutually exclusive. For the important questions in human nutrition like whether a diet high in saturated fat increases the risk of all cause mortality it takes many years for significant effects to appear.
That has been done in a few studies. But delivering food doesn't mean that study subjects actually ate it, or didn't eat other food. So it doesn't solve the data quality problem.
Because it involves humans? I am only half-joking, but I think it's much harder to track and study large numbers of humans than it is to do esoteric particle physics experiments.
> The optimal level of alcohol intake for health and longevity is zero
The whole "little alcohol can actually be healthy" meme is a good example of corporate sponsored research combined with publication bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias It went on 15-20 years before better and larger studies debunked it.
>Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.
For making global policy, the Lancet study is great. It's not the perfect study for determining an individual's risk factors. I looked at that Lancet study in detail trying to determine how much risk alcohol consumption poses to me personally, but it was challenging. For example, the #1 risk they associated with alcohol was tuberculosis--something I'm not concerned about at all.
> These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.
It ought to astonish me that people unironically think this way, but then I remember one of the most dangerous and life-shortening human tendencies of them all - the desire to control others.
It is the typical story where whatever you like doing ALSO has to be healthy and good in all respects. So it can't just be "I like having a glass or two of wine in the evening to unwind." Likewise it can't just be "I think eating animals is morally wrong so I don't do it." It's like the human mind instinctively rebels against having to weigh tradeoffs.
The link doesn't refute the J-shaped curve, but rather that small to moderate amount of alcohol has health benefits.
"Therefore, although there is a strong body of evidence that shows a J-shaped association between alcohol intake and mortality, it seems likely that the link between low–moderate intake and improved survival is not causal, and there is no ‘safe’ threshold intake below which drinking gives benefit. However, from an individual older person’s perspective, low–moderate alcohol consumption carries only small risks, and these may be counterbalanced by the pleasure obtained from drinking."
Or total/near-total abstainers may be so because of health issues. If small amounts of alcohol make you ill, you may not be great at handling other bodily assaults.
Or abstainers lose out on job opportunities/social networking, end up in a lower socioeconomic class and lose lifespan because of the negative effects of that.
The takeaway for me from the back-and-forth on alcohol consumption is that the effect size of moderate alcohol consumption on all cause mortality is close to zero. So whether or not you decide to drink alcohol in moderation should hinge on other factors. Do you enjoy having a glass or two of wine in the evening and suffer no noticeable ill effects the next day? Great, then have at it. Do you not enjoy drinking alcohol in any quantity or feel noticeably worse the next day even after one or two drinks? Great, then abstain entirely and don't worry about missing out on any alleged health benefits. Do you enjoy drinking alcohol but have a history of alcohol dependence in your family or find it difficult to stop at just one or two drinks? Maybe best to abstain.
That seems like a non sequitur ("The optimal level of alcohol intake for health and longevity is zero"). All I see in the article you referred (or the original article above) are several (valid) questions about the J shaped association, like confounding factors and survival bias. But these aren't evidence that the optimal level is zero. Merely challenging/speculating about the opposite view is not evidence.
Also, as the paper itself admits, drinking small amounts of alcohol has low risks, and while it argues against causation, it doesn't even discuss possible causational factors. E.g., consider the fact that alcohol can reduce stress, which we know has detrimental effects on health. Couldn't small amounts of alcohol be causally responsible then in improving longevity?
Not to be cynical, but I feel the medical community finds this positive low-alcohol/longevity J association rather inconvenient and take every opportunity to debunk it. May be they're right, but if we're to discredit the massive epidemiological evidence, we need more direct evidence and be objective about it.
I'm sure that there are many alternatives that would be healthier than alcohol for any given individual, be it exercise, social and economic stability, CBT, vacation, improved diet, better sleep, etc. However, in societies where alcohol consumption is an engrained feature of ordinary life and social interactions, is it even feasible to encourage every person to implement whichever of the myriad of alternatives would be more effective for them?
I would argue that, at the public health level, focusing on a naïve "zero level" of alcohol in favour of the "better alternatives" would at best be ineffective, not the least because the better alternatives can be promoted regardless of alcohol consumption. At worst they could even be harmful, if the encouraged abstinence were to discourage the social events associated with non-excessive alcohol consumption.
On an individual level yes indeed, having 0 beers a week may be provably healthier than having 10 beers a week, all else being equal. And that's the crucial point—all else being equal. Those beers are not drunk in isolation or without context. The individual may enjoy trying craft beer with their partner at dinner, or they may meet some friends at the pub and enjoy some slightly disinhibited laughs together. Could this person enjoy trying herbal teas with their partner? Perhaps. Could their friends meet up for a game of volleyball instead? Maybe. Is it realistic to expect similar alternatives to alcohol in the overall population? Very probably not.
I worried about this a lot before I quit drinking.
Now I can tell you that my social life is exactly the same as before - but I’m drinking water or near-beer or something fizzy instead. I don’t care, my friends don’t care, and if they did, they wouldn’t count as friends anyway.
Now if you’re a frat member, maybe it’s different.
My other half never thought she would be able to date me, because she wanted someone to share a bottle of wine with. Turns out, she can have a lovely time drinking wine and having a designated driver to get her home :)
But I will say that being tee total has impacted my experience of social gatherings based around drinking. Sure, with good friends it couldn't matter less. But with work folks, acquaintances etc? Yeah, it matters
Another thing to keep in mind is that non-alcoholic drinks as a sector are growing rapidly. We might see a sea change here within a generation, like we saw with smoking, where it simply isn’t cool anymore.
For anyone interested, I followed Allen Carr's Easy Way to Control Alcohol. It was a totally painless process for me
As an individual body, there is no benefit that alcohol provides your system that cannot be achieved through healthier means (that I'm aware of - tell me if I'm wrong).
I'm not saying alcohol isn't effective, I'm saying that in all cases there are healthier ways (wiser ways) to achieve the positive effects.
I'm not saying alcohol isn't efficient, I'm saying the work required to implement the healthier methods for the same effects is worth the extra effort.
At the public health level, I don't think there's any harm in condemning alcohol. I'm not saying prohibition, and I enjoy a good tequila or whiskey or wine or beer - it's great stuff. But the least of our members of society - those with the worst problems - are often making their lives worse with alcohol not better. I see no issue in messaging that repeatedly. Responsible and irresponsible people will always drink, but messaging the harm it causes more often could not hurt American society. I don't think that's naive at all. You may be confusing messaging "zero level" with a legal prohibition, and I don't think that's a valid equivalency. Exercise is good for you, abstaining from alcohol is good for you too. Just like abstaining from fast food. It doesn't mean everyone will comply, nor should you expect that. But messaging that this stuff is not healthy seems wise to me. Instead you see a steady drip of "a drink a day may be good for your heart" crap, that is assuredly endorsed and promoted by the beverage industry, and not with the health of society in mind.
I'm not sure why you're morally panicked. Alcohol is a toxin. Drink it and have fun. Nobody's telling you what to do with your life by informing you that alcohol and fast food don't do you any good from a physical health standpoint and are poor choices for mental health as well. You can rationalize away the harm, and probably quite effectively for you alone - it's not my business.
That 'alcohol reduces stress' is true short term, its not so much true long term. Think of those nasal sprays that reduce congestion. They absolutely do that, breathe that stuff in and it opens your airway real good, but at the same time it irritates those tissues so when the effect wears off, the airway becomes even more blocked than before because of the inflammation from the irritation. Alcohol does a similar thing for brain chemistry. It artificially slows things down (making you feel calmer), but the body's response is counter that effect so when the alcohol wears off, the stress levels can be higher than they were before - leading people to need another drink to relax.
There's a lot of research showing that yes, it does.
Here's a quote: "Long-term, heavy drinking can actually alter the brain’s chemistry, re-setting what is “normal.” It causes the release of higher amounts of cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone. When this hormonal balance is shifted, it impacts the way the body perceives stress and how it responds to it.21,22 For example, a long-term heavy drinker may experience higher levels of anxiety when faced with a stressful situation than someone who never drank or who drank only moderately" from https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/AA85/AA85.htm
You can search for alcohol's impact on GABA, cortisol, or just stress in general and find plenty of science showing that there are significant negative impacts to how the body responds to stress or various key hormones due to damage from alcohol.
Did you read the studies (cited in that review) that do Mendelian randomization? They seem fairly conclusive in favor of the view that the optimal alcohol intake is zero.
I looked at the paper but I don't understand how they got to that conclusion. There is still a J-shaped relationship between alcohol consumption and coronary heart disease outcomes. Not questioning the conclusion I just don't understand how you get to it from their data (due to my own ignorance).
Researchers are able to say that the J-shaped relationship is a result of factors correlated with alcohol use, instead of the effects of alcohol itself on the body, using a technique called Mendelian randomization.
Here's a summary for the lay reader [0]:
> One way to get around these limitations is through genetic studies. Some people carry a genetic variant that disrupts their ability to metabolize alcohol, causing them to develop skin flushing, irritation and other unpleasant symptoms when they drink alcohol. As a result, they tend to abstain or drink very little. If alcohol was good for heart health, these people should in theory have more heart disease compared to others. Instead, as one large analysis published in BMJ in 2014 found, they have “a more favorable cardiovascular profile and a reduced risk of coronary heart disease than those without the genetic variant.”
> The study concluded: “This suggests that reduction of alcohol consumption, even for light to moderate drinkers, is beneficial for cardiovascular health.”
(One fact not mentioned there is that for this technique to work and identify causality, the distribution of that genetic variant needs to be uncorrelated with all the other relevant variables. To my knowledge, this is true.)
>The optimal level of alcohol intake for health and longevity is zero
This is the conclusion of the most recent lancet study on alcohol and health. However, the lancet study comingles societal and personal health affects, which I find annoying (drunk driving, increased violence, etc)
From everything that I've read, alcohol has a j-curve benefit to cardio health, and a j curve detriment to cancer rates. When you look at mortality rates vs alcohol consumption, the J part of the curve doesn't return to 'tee-totaler' non drinker baseline until you're at ~ 4 drinks a day, which is a lot.
I'm not sure I understand the conclusions of that paper. The ADH1B variant is associated with lower alcohol consumption and also with lower cardiovascular risk but within that population there is still a J-curve relationship between cardiovascular disease and alcohol consumption.
Having a hard time figuring out the implications of this.
We know HRV is "good" as a general matter, as orderliness of heart-rate variation is predictive of mortality post-infarction [sorry no cite; read some papers in the 90's w/ convincing plots of instantaneous heart rate vs ihr 10 beats ago].
The linked research shows an increase in power of the middle part of the spectrum (fft of intrabeat heart rate), which is usually linked to respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA, or the change in chest cavity pressure while breathing changes your heart rate).
Anyway, it's interesting, but maybe the value is in the pathway discussion rather than any specific end-effects on health. Would love to hear from people closer to this topic , or OP's specific interest in the matter.
Chris Masterjohn theorizes that alcohol can have a beneficial hormetic (a stressor that you can have positive adaptations to) effect by antagonizing vitamin A and the body adapting to supply more vitamin A.
However, he theorizes the maximum beneficial dosage is about 2/3 of a single drink.
I have stopped drinking alcohol completely for a few years and the benefits are noticeable.
Good sleep patterns, higher energy levels, better concentration and emotional stability among the more obvious benefits.
My alcohol intake is down to about once a month, and that driven by social/networking type events. But similar results - it feels better to not drink than to drink.
I am from a family that considered drinking alcohol "normal"
Drink with food at social gatherings and to wind down at the end of the day.
My wife suggested that I quit completely, I never realised how it was affecting me until I stopped.
Booze is not good for you. If you think you are dependent on it or are concerned with the impact it has on your life try stopping. Stopping changed my life greatly.
I don't know you or your situation but if stopping feels like a large effort then it may be worth examining your relationship and possible reliance on alcohol.
OT: "Heart Rate Variability (HRV) gives us an idea about the state of our autonomic nervous system"
This answered a big medical doubt I have had for the past week.
For ages my heart rate has been at a stable 95-105 resting BPM with very little variability, which is quite high and understandable given my low fitness. I've recently radically changed my diet, and in 2 weeks my resting BPM has gone down to around 65 (!), changing rapidly up to 100 BPM if I move unless I'm staying completely still.
I was unsure of what this radical change meant, but apparently whatever I was doing before was very bad for me, and whatever I'm doing now is much better. Given that my diet change has also put my anxiety in remission, it makes sense that there's a strong connection between less overstimulation in the brain and more relaxed circulatory system.
Would very much like to try this for myself, but I would rather look for a more sustainable diet. Do you think it was a matter of missing nutrients, or rather intolerance of some sort to the carbohydrate sources?
Massive inflammation due to multiple unknown factors, making me even more intolerant to the simplest of food and spices. Carnivore is basically the ultimate elimination diet.
Oh yeah, and my brain works noticeably better than it has for the past 15 years. It's 100% reproducible for me, but I just need a lapse of judgement, the wrong food, and it's back to the dark pit of doom and extreme tiredness.
I never said it's the increase of meat in my diet that makes me feel better, but more likely the elimination of everything else. Grains were not the only factor, though a big one for me.
Also, ketosis is a superior state of being than the carb/insulin/blood sugar rollercoaster IMO.
HRV describes the steadiness (or not) of the timing between beats, as measured in milliseconds. It sounds like you are describing something else here, like your resting rate and how much/quickly it responds to exercise.
For an example of HRV, let's say you're showing a heart rate of exactly 95 BPM for a one minute period, which means an average of one beat every 0.6316 second. If the actual beats were very close to occurring exactly once every 0.6316 sec like clockwork, then you have a low HRV.
At some later time, you also measure 95 BPM during a one minute period, but this time you find the period between beats is much more variable. Sometimes it is 0.627 seconds, and sometimes it is 0.641 seconds. The beats aren't falling like clockwork, they are all over the place.
The second example is a high HRV, both examples having the same heart rate.
Accurate beat-measuring equipment is required to calculate HRV (e.g. a heart-rate watch and an app).
When I used to moderately binge some moons ago, I could feel my heart rate was all over the place. And the hangovers the next day didn't feel great either. Redbull vodkas should be called "Deathwish."
This might be an unpopular opinion: I like the taste of some alcoholic beverages, but the slight impairment from just one and the risk of a hangover is too much. I'd rather drink club soda and lime than imbibe.
> This might be an unpopular opinion: I like the taste of some alcoholic beverages, but the slight impairment from just one and the risk of a hangover is too much. I'd rather drink club soda and lime than imbibe.
Honestly I feel similar. I don’t mind drinking. Taste isn’t an issue and the immediate effects of intoxication are “fun” but I almost always feel like shit during and after the comedown. The after effects of a hangover are in my option worse than most of drugs I’ve tried.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadIt surprised me a lot.
My resting heart rate while sleeping is typically 64-68 without alcohol and 65-85 after drinking several glasses of wine. There is such a marked difference in RHR in the two scenarios that you could tell if I drank simply by looking at my heart rate chart during the night.
Interestingly, I attempted to start running for one month about a year ago. My endurance is poor, but I would run/walk for several kilometers. Within the first week and continuing through that month, my RHR while sleeping was 52-62. Not only was it significantly lower, it took a long time after stopping exercise for the rate to return to what it usually is.
I don't know what this all really means, but it is fascinating. Studies or not, I imagine that not drinking + regular cardio exercise is better for long life than the alternative combinations.
but contrary to the article, an evening whiskey ~3 times a week (in my experience) seems to be optimal for delivering antiseptic benefits with few/no downsides.
That was the biggest effect I saw by far, more than all the sleep apnea variables I was trying to measure!
Granted I don't drink often, and metabolize alcohol poorly, but still that's a huge difference.
FWIW I'm not out of shape; I commuted 1h / day by bike for over a decade, and was a medically normal weight, which is maybe 20-30th percentile in the population.
An RHR that gets into the 85 range could indicate a cardiac problem. Might want to get that checked.
When I went back to the article to check this, however, I saw that, while the text says that alchohol has "a negative effect on HRV", and their model explains this, the diagram shows alcohol increasing the HRV. As the text's version of the observed results and its explanation for them are consistent, I assume the diagram is incorrectly labelled.
Update: Thanks to everyone for correcting me on what HRV means here.
It is believed to occur as the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system "fight" over raising and lowering the heartrate. The symbiosis between them lands on a steady rate per minute with fluctuations on a per beat basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_variability
I could try cutting it out, but I've had trouble falling asleep my entire life, and my average annual caffeine intake was very low until my mid-teens. I'm actually much better about sleep now than I used to be, even without meds. Worth a shot, though, I guess. I'd been thinking about dropping my intake to one cup per day, alternating coffee and green tea (which would represent a large increase in my consumption of green tea) anyway. Hell, at lower volume I could justify buying the expensive, low-package-weight, really, really good beans, so the flavor of the coffee I'm drinking would improve, though I might have to group coffee-days rather than alternate them, to avoid issues with beans going stale. Seems like ~halving my caffeine would be an OK start.
Sigh. Guess I'm going to be spending a lot of money on sparkling water, just like when I kicked my soda habit :-)
However, a more critical review[0] of the epidemiological data that took into account genetic variants which impact the effect of alcohol intake on longevity shows that the described J-shaped relationship is not as robust as once thought. In conclusion the review simply states:
The optimal level of alcohol intake for health and longevity is zero
[0] https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article/49/3/332/5799035
What I find crazy is that nations around the world collaborate and spend billions of dollars building a particle accelerator and yet we can't seem to find money to research something that affects every human every day of their lives.
Most human nutrition studies are only observational and barely a step above junk science. Don't take them too seriously.
Humans are incredible explorers, self-sacrificing for the greater (perceived) good. We should consider continuing our legacy by understanding ourselves better through rigorous science. (And hopefully end the historical legacy of making thousands of other species extinct via our exploration.)
I believe the Journal of Controversial Idea (https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/) will explore some of these topics, shortly.
So as a practical matter most studies tend to rely on subject reported data, which is notoriously inaccurate. People forget to record little snacks, or don't weigh their portions, or lie about their behavior because they're ashamed.
Yes of course it's expensive which is why I said we should have larger scale studies with more test subjects funded by the government.
Also, what does subject reported data have to do with RTCs? What are you even arguing about?
If you have a better approach for study design then I'm sure nutrition researchers would love to hear it.
Yes, to do a proper RCT you need to confine and monitor subjects in a controlled environment. YOU used the word "years" and nobody ever suggested a study that long. If you're implying that you need a study that long to gather meaningful results then that's just simply not true.
Let me put this plainly, you can design RCTs that are:
A) Safe for participants.
B) Aren't too long.
C) Don't rely on subject reported data.
D) Still give meaningful results.
These are not mutually exclusive and they are done all the time. These are gold-standard experiments in the nutrition field.
Like you said, they are expensive to do and usually only have a small number of subjects. That's why I'm suggesting that wealthy governments should collaborate to fund massive-scale trials at maximum quality.
Best of luck to you. I'm out.
Yes, it is relatively expensive, but not prohibitively so.
The whole "little alcohol can actually be healthy" meme is a good example of corporate sponsored research combined with publication bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias It went on 15-20 years before better and larger studies debunked it.
Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
>Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.
It ought to astonish me that people unironically think this way, but then I remember one of the most dangerous and life-shortening human tendencies of them all - the desire to control others.
It also is what everyone drinking a few glasses of wine here and there want to hear
I don't think we should rely on any group's anecdotal espousal of the health benefits of their choices.
"Therefore, although there is a strong body of evidence that shows a J-shaped association between alcohol intake and mortality, it seems likely that the link between low–moderate intake and improved survival is not causal, and there is no ‘safe’ threshold intake below which drinking gives benefit. However, from an individual older person’s perspective, low–moderate alcohol consumption carries only small risks, and these may be counterbalanced by the pleasure obtained from drinking."
Or abstainers lose out on job opportunities/social networking, end up in a lower socioeconomic class and lose lifespan because of the negative effects of that.
Who knows.
Also, as the paper itself admits, drinking small amounts of alcohol has low risks, and while it argues against causation, it doesn't even discuss possible causational factors. E.g., consider the fact that alcohol can reduce stress, which we know has detrimental effects on health. Couldn't small amounts of alcohol be causally responsible then in improving longevity?
Not to be cynical, but I feel the medical community finds this positive low-alcohol/longevity J association rather inconvenient and take every opportunity to debunk it. May be they're right, but if we're to discredit the massive epidemiological evidence, we need more direct evidence and be objective about it.
I would argue that, at the public health level, focusing on a naïve "zero level" of alcohol in favour of the "better alternatives" would at best be ineffective, not the least because the better alternatives can be promoted regardless of alcohol consumption. At worst they could even be harmful, if the encouraged abstinence were to discourage the social events associated with non-excessive alcohol consumption.
On an individual level yes indeed, having 0 beers a week may be provably healthier than having 10 beers a week, all else being equal. And that's the crucial point—all else being equal. Those beers are not drunk in isolation or without context. The individual may enjoy trying craft beer with their partner at dinner, or they may meet some friends at the pub and enjoy some slightly disinhibited laughs together. Could this person enjoy trying herbal teas with their partner? Perhaps. Could their friends meet up for a game of volleyball instead? Maybe. Is it realistic to expect similar alternatives to alcohol in the overall population? Very probably not.
Now I can tell you that my social life is exactly the same as before - but I’m drinking water or near-beer or something fizzy instead. I don’t care, my friends don’t care, and if they did, they wouldn’t count as friends anyway.
Now if you’re a frat member, maybe it’s different.
But I will say that being tee total has impacted my experience of social gatherings based around drinking. Sure, with good friends it couldn't matter less. But with work folks, acquaintances etc? Yeah, it matters
For anyone interested, I followed Allen Carr's Easy Way to Control Alcohol. It was a totally painless process for me
I'm not saying alcohol isn't effective, I'm saying that in all cases there are healthier ways (wiser ways) to achieve the positive effects.
I'm not saying alcohol isn't efficient, I'm saying the work required to implement the healthier methods for the same effects is worth the extra effort.
At the public health level, I don't think there's any harm in condemning alcohol. I'm not saying prohibition, and I enjoy a good tequila or whiskey or wine or beer - it's great stuff. But the least of our members of society - those with the worst problems - are often making their lives worse with alcohol not better. I see no issue in messaging that repeatedly. Responsible and irresponsible people will always drink, but messaging the harm it causes more often could not hurt American society. I don't think that's naive at all. You may be confusing messaging "zero level" with a legal prohibition, and I don't think that's a valid equivalency. Exercise is good for you, abstaining from alcohol is good for you too. Just like abstaining from fast food. It doesn't mean everyone will comply, nor should you expect that. But messaging that this stuff is not healthy seems wise to me. Instead you see a steady drip of "a drink a day may be good for your heart" crap, that is assuredly endorsed and promoted by the beverage industry, and not with the health of society in mind.
This is all just an attempt to create moral panic with pretension it is all concern about health. So people are free to point out that.
Here's a quote: "Long-term, heavy drinking can actually alter the brain’s chemistry, re-setting what is “normal.” It causes the release of higher amounts of cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone. When this hormonal balance is shifted, it impacts the way the body perceives stress and how it responds to it.21,22 For example, a long-term heavy drinker may experience higher levels of anxiety when faced with a stressful situation than someone who never drank or who drank only moderately" from https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/AA85/AA85.htm
You can search for alcohol's impact on GABA, cortisol, or just stress in general and find plenty of science showing that there are significant negative impacts to how the body responds to stress or various key hormones due to damage from alcohol.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/allergies/exp...
Here's a summary for the lay reader [0]:
> One way to get around these limitations is through genetic studies. Some people carry a genetic variant that disrupts their ability to metabolize alcohol, causing them to develop skin flushing, irritation and other unpleasant symptoms when they drink alcohol. As a result, they tend to abstain or drink very little. If alcohol was good for heart health, these people should in theory have more heart disease compared to others. Instead, as one large analysis published in BMJ in 2014 found, they have “a more favorable cardiovascular profile and a reduced risk of coronary heart disease than those without the genetic variant.”
> The study concluded: “This suggests that reduction of alcohol consumption, even for light to moderate drinkers, is beneficial for cardiovascular health.”
(One fact not mentioned there is that for this technique to work and identify causality, the distribution of that genetic variant needs to be uncorrelated with all the other relevant variables. To my knowledge, this is true.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/well/eat/should-we-be-dri...
This is the conclusion of the most recent lancet study on alcohol and health. However, the lancet study comingles societal and personal health affects, which I find annoying (drunk driving, increased violence, etc)
From everything that I've read, alcohol has a j-curve benefit to cardio health, and a j curve detriment to cancer rates. When you look at mortality rates vs alcohol consumption, the J part of the curve doesn't return to 'tee-totaler' non drinker baseline until you're at ~ 4 drinks a day, which is a lot.
How do you know this?
The Apple Watch records this data.
Anecdotally, 1.5 drinks within 5 hours of going to sleep raises resting heart rate by 5%-10%. My friends who have an Apple Watch have similar results.
My personal data on HRV and booze is too erratic to draw conclusions.
We know HRV is "good" as a general matter, as orderliness of heart-rate variation is predictive of mortality post-infarction [sorry no cite; read some papers in the 90's w/ convincing plots of instantaneous heart rate vs ihr 10 beats ago].
The linked research shows an increase in power of the middle part of the spectrum (fft of intrabeat heart rate), which is usually linked to respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA, or the change in chest cavity pressure while breathing changes your heart rate).
Anyway, it's interesting, but maybe the value is in the pathway discussion rather than any specific end-effects on health. Would love to hear from people closer to this topic , or OP's specific interest in the matter.
However, he theorizes the maximum beneficial dosage is about 2/3 of a single drink.
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/lite-videos/2018/12/13/is-alc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIv96reVlAE
"We were in the background, gently swaying from side to side"
This answered a big medical doubt I have had for the past week.
For ages my heart rate has been at a stable 95-105 resting BPM with very little variability, which is quite high and understandable given my low fitness. I've recently radically changed my diet, and in 2 weeks my resting BPM has gone down to around 65 (!), changing rapidly up to 100 BPM if I move unless I'm staying completely still.
I was unsure of what this radical change meant, but apparently whatever I was doing before was very bad for me, and whatever I'm doing now is much better. Given that my diet change has also put my anxiety in remission, it makes sense that there's a strong connection between less overstimulation in the brain and more relaxed circulatory system.
Oh yeah, and my brain works noticeably better than it has for the past 15 years. It's 100% reproducible for me, but I just need a lapse of judgement, the wrong food, and it's back to the dark pit of doom and extreme tiredness.
Also, ketosis is a superior state of being than the carb/insulin/blood sugar rollercoaster IMO.
For an example of HRV, let's say you're showing a heart rate of exactly 95 BPM for a one minute period, which means an average of one beat every 0.6316 second. If the actual beats were very close to occurring exactly once every 0.6316 sec like clockwork, then you have a low HRV.
At some later time, you also measure 95 BPM during a one minute period, but this time you find the period between beats is much more variable. Sometimes it is 0.627 seconds, and sometimes it is 0.641 seconds. The beats aren't falling like clockwork, they are all over the place.
The second example is a high HRV, both examples having the same heart rate.
Accurate beat-measuring equipment is required to calculate HRV (e.g. a heart-rate watch and an app).
This might be an unpopular opinion: I like the taste of some alcoholic beverages, but the slight impairment from just one and the risk of a hangover is too much. I'd rather drink club soda and lime than imbibe.
Honestly I feel similar. I don’t mind drinking. Taste isn’t an issue and the immediate effects of intoxication are “fun” but I almost always feel like shit during and after the comedown. The after effects of a hangover are in my option worse than most of drugs I’ve tried.