health

Zero tolerance: No safe level of alcohol, study says

14 Comments
By Marlowe Hood

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There are hundreds of articles saying the opposite.... I guess believe whatever you feel like.

0 ( +4 / -4 )

Biased study easily dismissed. Countries cited for high average drinking habits have among highest life expancties.

Last, Jeanne Calment used to drinking a Porto wine glass each day for years...

Moderate alcohol habit is good.

I believe they could show that life kills you.

1 ( +4 / -3 )

Just wait a few months for a new study to come out counteracting this one I guess. Alcohol consumption has been part of human society and culture for thousands of years, obviously if you're drinking for the sake of drinking and downing bottles of vodka on a regular basis then that's not good for you, but if a glass or two in the evening was so dangerous surely we'd have plenty of hard and irrefutable evidence against it like we have found with other substances like tobacco or trans fats.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

There are hundreds of articles saying the opposite.... I guess believe whatever you feel like.

There are, but this study is more comprehensive that anything that proceeds it.

However, the study above does not provide a clear picture of the perspective of how marginal the health gains are of stopping drinking, but was well-covered in this article:

Yet Prof David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, sounded a note of caution about the findings.

"Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said.

"There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving.

"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45283401

Moderate drinking might shorten your life expectancy for some a tiny bit, but for most a risk worth taking.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

gogogoToday  07:29 am JST

There are hundreds of articles saying the opposite.... I guess believe whatever you feel like.

That's the worst possible response a person could make to complex data. Never believe "whatever you feel like" just because the information is hard to interpret. If articles have contradictory conclusions, smart people should analyze the articles to understand what causes their discrepancy. In all likelihood, close analysis will usually show that they don't actually contradict each other, or if they do, there is some kind of research flaw that gives us reason to not entirely rely on one (or both) of them.

But in any case, the correct response to not knowing something conclusively is never to just abandon the concept of objective facts.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

To the sceptics, the article/study doesn't say that moderate drinking is always (as in 'for everyone & all the time') bad for your health but that "alcohol use is more likely than not to do harm" and that 'The protective effect of alcohol was offset by the risks,"

In other words the risks associated with alcohol consumption far outweigh the benefits.

1 ( +4 / -3 )

Remember when "experts" told us that eating tomato sauce and eggs were supposed to be bad for us, now they are telling us how healthy they are - the Queen of England has reportedly been drinking three gin and tonics a day for years and she's in her 90's, so drink alcohol in moderation and stop worrying about the so called experts

-2 ( +2 / -4 )

Andrew CrispToday  06:50 pm JST

Remember when "experts" told us that eating tomato sauce [...] were supposed to be bad for us,

Are you asking if anyone here remembers the 19th century?

While we're reminiscing, anyone remember when "experts" eradicated smallpox? Identified and synthesized vitamins? Sequenced the human genome?

0 ( +1 / -1 )

"No safe level of alcohol"

Tell that to the millions of restaurants, bars and liquor stores that need to serve alcohol to survive as businesses, and to the supermarkets that might be able to survive without alcohol sales, but would suffer a big drop in sales. Oh, and don't forget the alcohol drink makers, like Suntory which makes For Relaxing Times Make It Suntory Times whiskey, and since last week, Kyo no Aki 3rd category beer, which is pretty darn drinkable, if you ask me, but what do I know, lol, and, omg, Jim Beam bourbon ( owned now by Suntory, lol ) And apparently Scotch whiskey will survive into the 23rd century, as attested to by Montgomery Scott, lol

0 ( +2 / -2 )

It's a peer-reviewed journal. They are experts, not "experts".

6 ( +7 / -1 )

In other words the risks associated with alcohol consumption far outweigh the benefits.

@goldorak - it depends on how narrowly you define benefits. Alcohol has plenty of benefits that are not health related.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Last, Jeanne Calment used to drinking a Porto wine glass each day for years...

She also devoured something like a half kilo of chocolate per week for most of her 120 plus years.

I spent some time studying lifespans and came to the conclusion that genes were 90% the determining factor - followed by happiness and activity. I don't think diet and alcohol have much of an effect unless your drinking/eating habits are excessively bad.

3 ( +4 / -1 )

Well...as I read this with my glass of wine...

1 ( +1 / -0 )

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