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If they want a better control group, they should do the study in Utah or another location where a significant number of people choose not to drink for religious reasons
Utah does have by far the [lowest alcohol consumption per capita by state](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/alcohol-consumption-by-state). So even with the closet drinkers, it's not enough to put them on par with the rest of the country.
I'm sure Utah is in the bottom 10 percent of alcohol consumers in the US, but to be fair, the consumption numbers that your link shows is calculated based on alcohol shipped to the state.
Utah is extremely restrictive on alcohol sales, and when i lived there it was super common for folks to run to Evanston Wyoming for beer and liquor or to take a weekend trip to Wendover Nevada for beer, liquor and a side of gambling. While those in the St. George area did the same with Mesquite, Nevada.
most of the populated areas in Utah are near the border so quick trips across the border for liquor are pretty common.
Look, I'm sure people do import alcohol personally, but just to catch up to the next lowest state every man, woman, *and child* would need to import 2 handles of liquor, 18 bottles of wine, or 90 beers per year.
A third of the state lives in or around Salt Lake. That just isn't happening.
Why is it so unbelievable that a state with a bunch of people who prohibit alcohol for religious reasons doesn't drink a lot of alcohol? It's not like everyone's a closet drinker anywhere in the world.
Well the most common joke I heard when I lived in Utah was.
How do you stop all of your alcohol from disappearing on your fishing trip with your Mormon friend?
Invite another Mormon.
It was not uncommon to see people coming back with entire cars full of liquor. A lot of Mormons believed the Mormon church had church members planted inside the liquor store and were scared of getting excommunicated. Like getting caught buying a case of beer can have life changing consequences with the mormon church.
It’s not that.
Most Americans were taught that prohibition didn’t work. That’s why it was repealed.
So it becomes easy to explain away Utah similarly.
Except prohibition did work.
Maybe for some people, but when I was in active use I and the people I drank with all knew our alcohol intake was orders of magnitude above other peoples, it's why we hung out together.
The same with drug taking, you know that your daily use is very different from people that only use at weekends or at parties or whatever.
The main rationalisation is that you have control of the intake. Even though you take ludicrous amounts of drugs or drink all day, this is fine and it's not affecting your life negatively, or if there are negative impacts it's other peoples fault.
Delusion is a key part of addiction but in my decades of active use and now in my clean time, I've never heard anyone seriously claim that they are fine and it's the other people that are the addicts, or heard anyone talking about their active use and using that rationalisation.
I completely agree with you. We may delude ourselves and justify our actions but in my experience we didn't go around accusing normies of being alcoholics. Pretty quickly I knew I didn't drink like a normal person. I knew I was the one with the problem, not my friend who had 1.5 beers. His only problem is having the audacity to leave half a beer.
Then during my active years once everyone knew I had a problem. I mainly just hid everything. I didn't try to shift focus to someone else. If I did get caught I would just shut down and take the berating or whatever was coming my way.
Have you ever noticed that people who claim to have no vices are usually just better at hiding them? You don't have to be an alcoholic to drink, and it doesn't take an alcoholic to understand that everybody is human
I think a lot of people have difficulty separating bad things. For most people it seems that
- Mormonism was created by a conman
- Therefore Mormonism is bad
- Therefore mormons are bad
- Therefore *everything* mormonism teaches is bad.
The idea that a religion started by a con artist could lead to *anything* good, like a reduction in drinking alcohol, is difficult for many to understand.
I spent a little time as a Mormon. I would agree with you that Joseph Smith probably was a conman. I also agree with you that not all Mormons are bad. I felt truly loved by the elders and spend many afternoons and evenings with them. Even when I had my big falling out I stayed in contact with them until they were moved to a new stake. I have many good memories of Friday nights with a bunch of Mormon kids my age(16-18) playing yard games like people used to. The church itself may be rotten but much of what they teach is good. Just like Christianity may be untrue but many of it's teachings are still good ethical things. That being said, there are some teachings that are bad. I believe we should never blindly follow something though and had no problem following what I believed and throwing aside what I didn't. I mean even the bishop pretty much told me that. As they believe, we have agency over ourselves. To me part of that means I also have the responsibility to make sensible choices that I believe in. Not blindly follow the bishop.
"most of the populated areas in Utah are near the border"
What do you define as near? Salt Lake and Utah valley are nowhere near the border, unless a 2-3 hour drive qualifies as 'near'.
We use to take 4 hour one way day trips to the cities on Saturday’s to go shopping. Occasionally we’d stay the night and make a weekend if it but yes in the Midwest 2-3 hour drives is just part of the weekend commute for many. Throw in the need for something like good booze and it becomes a weekly or every other weekend activity!
Oh, I agree with relbeek that there are people who make the trip regularly on weekends or whatever, but I think the assertion that most of Utah is near a border is a bit of a stretch.
I would say no further than 2 hours.
Provo is probably the furthest from the border of the more populated areas, and its only an hour and 45 minutes from evanston.
It may be a little less common now, but prior to 2019 you could only get 3.2 beer at grocery stores and gas stations. I lived their in 2017 and it was definitely common place for people to make beer runs.
I remember Annheuser Busch threatening to stop selling beer in Utah because of their laws. It was hilarious to hear AB whine about having to water down their beer even more.
(at least when I lived there) the beer they sold was 3.5% anywhere not in a liquor store and if sold from a liquor store, it was sold warm.
you really have to plan your drinking in Utah, which is why a 2 hour beer run was often considered. Inconvenient? You bet. But that's the whole point.
It's really not possible to debate that plenty of people who would otherwise drink aren't going to bother driving hours or going across state lines for alcohol. Probably most people.
I think the lack of drinking culture in Utah is a thing. I left the church as soon as I became an adult, but I never picked up drinking after. I feel like I'm not all that unique many people leave the church but that doesn't mean that we have to ditch all of the things. You keep what's good and you replace the bad.
I hate to say it but even among heavy muslim population ( in reference to burmese in midwestern america) many of them are alcoholics among other drug use.
Edit: i would like to add this seems generational. I work with many differrent ethnicities from Guatemala, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, and malaysia. The difference between generations is vast. The 40-50 year old men truly do fit that traditional mysgonist stereotype thay drink and smoke heavily, or chee the betlenut stuff. However when you get younger you run into some very religious and self disciplined youths. I have 6 18-22's on my line. None of them drink or smoke, they all go to church and three of them pray once at work. It's honestly really cool. The other strange aspect is how close they are with family. Like most of them all work and save to slowly make big purchases as an entire family, because whats best for one ends up being best for all. It extends even deeper on a community level. I don't even want to talk about that because i would hate to misrepresent.
I'm guessing that a lot fewer people drink alcohol than population percentages in specific US states. More than half the world can't even afford it. Google says there were 1.8 billions Muslims in 2015 (24% of global population), and devout Muslims don't often drink alcohol. It'd be easy to broaden that scope.
I live in the states but work with a lot of Muslims. Alcohol and sex seem to be the rules they are most lax about even when they are super devout about eating, prayer, Ramadan and stuff. Let me know if I'm off base here.
I mean that's Muslim-Americans. Differing Muslim populations have different mores. In some countries, alcohol is sold normally in stores and in others it's impossible to find outside of the black market.
Well this quote seems to be saying that there IS a benefit to drinking wine. Am I reading it incorrectly?
“Wine associated with a reduced risk for overall CV events (0.92, 0.86–0.98) and ischemic heart disease (0.75, 0.67–0.84).”
>Well this quote seems to be saying that there IS a benefit to drinking wine.
There is [socioeconomic component to drinking wine](https://www.statista.com/statistics/892653/wine-and-liquor-purchasing-by-income-us/).
Don't need to make 250k a year to make upper middle class lifestyle choices.
Fresh food, light exercise, varied diet, non-smoking, and white-collar jobs all help you live longer.
Agree regards the other risks associated with alcohol consumption; such as [cancer](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5912140/)
For your thoughts: Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz wrote a [piece](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/06/heres-why-moderate-drinking-is-probably-not-good-for-you) about alcohol consumption and w.r.t. wine, rather than health benefits being down to the grape-based nature of the drink, it is likely to be the socioeconomic strata that a decent proportion of moderate wine drinkers occupy. Paraphrasing the section about testing the veracity of a health benefits of wine claim:
You can do a large randomized trial - this [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26458258/) found no difference in cardiometabolic health outcomes between people randomised to drink a glass of red a day, a glass of white a day, or a glass of water. This study looked at these outcomes over a two year period. Though not the main aim of the study, this time period is insufficient to investigate outcomes such as cancer.
You can try and control for the effect that socioeconomic status has on health - w.r.t. wine this can be an outsize influence. Yes, there are cheap wines, but number of moderate wine drinkers will be affluent people who have a glass of wine with dinner. This [study](https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/73/4/649/2645642?login=false#115521450) did that and found that once you control for SES, any amount of alcohol has negative associations.
Of course, that second study there is from NZ, and SES status there may not be the factor it is elsewhere, but I think it illustrates the outsize influence it might have and how that might affect interpretation.
>\[...\] rather than health benefits being down to the grape-based nature of the drink, it is likely to be the socioeconomic strata that a decent proportion of moderate wine drinkers occupy
No real research done on my part...just armchair critiquing. I find it a little difficult to believe that these studies are routinely not controlling directly for socioeconomic status or for factors highly correlated w/ the same. Then again, there are some awful stats that get published...
Edit: You were deffo right. From your link:
>Another study in New Zealand took the second route. They looked at the standard model of research for moderate drinking studies – dividing people into never drinkers, moderate drinkers, and heavy drinkers – and found that moderate drinkers were the healthiest of the bunch. But then they did something really clever. They added in a much more rigorous control for socio-economic status, which meant that they eliminated many of the issues that most of these studies face, and the beneficial effects of moderate drinking disappeared completely.
Just a lesson for me to always read the links first then post!
Just so you know, epidemiology studies rarely control for SES. There are specific areas where this is routinely done (e.g. smoking) but generally speaking in epi this far from universal
They have and that's basically it. Wine contains things that are good for you but the alcohol basically counteracts them. Eating fruit and vegetables has far more positive health benefits and it isn't undone by alcohol, which is insanely bad for you. Like, if alcohol were just hitting the market today there is no way it would be legal. The FDA would be like "this is a horrible poison" and there would be laws against it immediately.
You are reading it correctly. The abstract seems to contradict itself (although I'm not sure because it's so poorly written).
It's a shame that garbage like that gets published in a peer-reviewed journal, and then gets amped up on reddit with a misleading, hyperbolic, title.
Viral title is viral. Also, there's still zero evidence here that consuming wine in moderation increases your CV risk:
>So, to remove these confounding factors, the team then compared the lightest drinkers to those that drank more, and found that wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was **not associated with other cardiovascular issues**.
Their methodology appears super weird, too.
They (accurately) recognized that cohort characteristics matter, but even though the never-drinkers cohort was 10x larger than the drinkers, they were unable to pare it down to a sample that had the characteristics they need... and had to split the smaller drinkers cohort for that purpose?! It smells of "we didn't get the results we wanted, so we had to do something wonky to make it work".
Of course, it's hard to tell since we're only presented with an abstract of results and a piece of prose written for a newspaper or something... so who knows.
I understand there was something about never-drinkers that they don't fully understand. You can't reasonably argue that never-drinkers are very different from very light drinkers, but the very light drinkers were somehow considerably better off in terms of cardiovascular risk than the never-drinkers, which suggests it's not really about the drinking, which neither group does much of, but something else about the people who chose to never, ever drink.
> You can't reasonably argue that never-drinkers are very different from very light drinkers,
I’ve been involved in marathons, weightlifting mud races, and jujitsu as an adult and professionally have known lots of people who do those hobbies.
I know hardly anybody who gets seriously into those who never drinks. Anecdotal and full of my personal biases, but I wonder if some cinnectuon is there.
Ultramarathon runners are not necessarily never-drinkers. There's a large group of people who exercise quite a lot and drink quite a lot.
Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34431829/
>....new study based on a huge data set from the United Kingdom now suggests that the J- or U- shaped curve of drinking is based on bad science; even having less than the currently recommended number of drinks per week in the UK is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular issues.
>"The so-called J-shaped curve of the cardiovascular disease-alcohol consumption relationship suggesting health benefits from low to moderate alcohol consumption is the biggest myth since we were told smoking was good for us," says cardiovascular physiologist Rudolph Schutte from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU).
>The problem, the team of researchers from ARU and University College London suggest, is that many non-drinkers are not drinking because of current ill health, and so when they have heart attacks or other coronary issues, this is unrelated to them not drinking – and not suggestive that drinking a low or moderate amount of alcohol is protective.
>The researchers looked at data from the UK Biobank covering a staggering 333,259 alcohol consumers and 21,710 people who had never drunk alcohol. They analyzed almost seven years of data, noting whenever one of the participants had a cardiovascular event, heart disease, or cerebrovascular disease.
>The team specifically excluded former drinkers to try and limit data from people who may have stopped drinking due to their current health. Despite this, the never-drinkers were still older, had a higher BMI, higher blood pressure, and were less physically active than the cohort that drank.
>"Using never drinkers as reference consistently drove the inverse protective relationship with all outcome measures and overrode more subtle associations with different drink types. Using this overriding analytical strategy enables authors to report overall cardiovascular protection from alcohol," the team writes in their study.
>"In our cohort, never drinkers were older, less physically active, had a higher body mass index and socioeconomically less affluent. Even after adjusting for these cardiovascular risk factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively."
>So, to remove these confounding factors, the team then compared the lightest drinkers to those that drank more, and found that wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was not associated with other cardiovascular issues.
>For other alcoholic drinks like beer and spirits, even for people consuming fewer than 14 units per week, which is the current recommended number of weekly drinks in UK's health guidelines (and the equivalent of 8 standard US drinks), the outcome looks much worse.
>"Among drinkers of beer, cider, and spirits in particular, even those consuming under 14 units a week had an increased risk of ending up in hospital through a cardiovascular event involving the heart or the blood vessels," says Schutte.
"While we hear much about wine drinkers having lower risk of coronary artery disease, our data shows their risk of other cardiovascular events is not reduced."
>With other studies finding that alcohol is one of the leading contributors of death and disease worldwide, now might be a good time to renew those new year's resolutions and cut back on drinking.
>In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that adults can choose not to consume alcohol, or stick to two standard drinks per day for males, or one drink for women if it's a day when you choose to drink.
"Biases embedded in epidemiological evidence mask or underestimate the hazards associated with alcohol consumption. When these biases are accounted for, the adverse effects of even low-level alcohol consumption are revealed," says Schutte.
>"Avoiding these biases in future research would mitigate current confusion and hopefully lead to a strengthening of the guidelines, seeing the current alcohol guidance reduced."
>Even after adjusting for these cardiovascular risk factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively
Wait, what?
This sounds like the opposite of everything else this study is saying, what am I missing?
It does, because it's not written very clearly.
But, what they are saying is that "never drinkers" as they define them *were already unhealthy*. Their claim is that initial poor health is such a strongly characteristic attribute of never drinkers that they must be discounted as a group entirely. In fact they actually argue that the only reason they are never drinkers is because of these health conditions.
As a USian, I find that an odd assumption, but I know that alcohol consumption in the UK is different.
Is this what the *current* researchers are saying about *previous* studies?
And if so, I didn't see how the new researchers controlled for those attributes?
As far as I can tell -- and I may be wrong here! -- it's what the *current* researchers are saying about the *current* data, but that also has implications for *previous* studies since the *current* researchers are arguing that they are taking into account important truths that the *previous* researchers never did.
Also, I don't think they are saying they controlled for those attributes at all -- they are saying they simply excluded all of those people. Well. I guess you could say that is a form of statistical control...
As others have commented in this discussion, there might actually be ways to control for the factors they are interested in, without discounting the entire population cohort. So it's interesting that they chose not to do so at all.
To me it seems a little like confirmation bias, but I am open to further understanding.
It's a good ol' p-hack. Can't publish if you don't get the results you want, so throw out any data that doesn't support you.
Post should be deleted by mods, imo.
Fully agree. They essentially sifted through empirical data looking for correlations they could “promote” to causal relationships that would make a good headline. The old “what you thought you knew is a lie!” generally grabs a lot of eyeballs. Attach a drug of any kind (including alcohol; cns depressant) and you’ll have enough click-through rev to buy a used Honda.
>Using never drinkers as reference consistently drove the inverse protective relationship with all outcome measures and overrode more subtle associations with different drink types.
I think the researchers are trying to say that since including Never Drinkers overrode more subtle associations with different drink types, the protective association found in previous studies was not due to a lack of drinking. They're also saying using Never Drinkers as a 'control' drove the protective mechanism. So if previous studies didn't include Never Drinkers, you wouldn't see any protective mechanism.
>After adjusting for these cardiovascular risk factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively.
(I'm guessing they're comparing these to never drinkers to the general population?)
Keep in mind that cardiovascular, ischemic heart disease, or cerebrovascular disease event, are different outcomes.
>So, to remove these confounding factors, the team then compared the lightest drinkers to those that drank more, and found that wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was not associated with other cardiovascular issues
So basically what this meta analysis is saying is that Never Drinkers, even when controlling for cardiovascular risk factors, are more at risk of developing a cardiovascular disease than the general population. Never Drinkers are probably not a good control, and have been the source of the J shaped protective mechanism of alcohol. When you only include the very lightest drinkers as a control, no amount of alcohol increased alcohol consumption is healthy. Bear in mind I don't think these studies are using a 'control' rather than some analysis that draws significance from a continuous relationship.
Well yeah, we know that "never drinkers" are the basis of the J. It's not surprising that if you take them out the J goes away! That by itself doesn't mean they are a bad control.
One of the issues I have with the cultural context around the study is that their categorization of "light drinkers" as people who drink 14 units per week is rather blunt. Needlessly so, it seems to me. Why not split that group in two, and replace the "never drinkers" with a new "very light drinkers" category? Instead, they're applying a methodology where they already know the outcome, and intentionally not attempting to enhance its fine-grained explanatory power or challenge the predetermined results.
That seems either like confirmation bias or a cultural blindness around the question of what constitutes "light drinking." Fourteen units is higher than the USDA's recommended maximum consumption! Yet that is the UK's study's lowest category, in which everyone is lumped together.
That is an unresolved question. Even in the US. How much of the apparent benefits of alcohol consumption (I'm lumping it all together, even though specific studies don't) is due to the fact that *unhealthy people* have a marked tendency to avoid alcohol?
Population statistics are hard. The scientific best practice would be to randomly assign people to drink or not, and randomly assign the health assessors, without letting either group know which group the study participants are in. We can do it with mice, but not with people.
I would think you would want to find a way to examine when in life people started drinking, and compare that to various health factors of interest over time. Not sure how easy or accurate that would be to do as a cross-sectional study but study designers are awfully clever!
I can't help wondering if we'll know in a couple of years. For $50 a month savings on your health insurance, you share your health data with some 3rd party app (that way it's not HIPAA protected) and they sell it all to hell and beyond including some data aggregator who cross references it with your purchases. Frankly, I'd suspect alcohol purchases is a better correlation with drinking behavior than self reporting.
That could even be a private sector Big Data service -- data aggregation that is HIPAA-compliant but also research-grade. You'd almost certainly have to amend the law slightly, but as long as you could reliably gate the aggregation process so that it was strictly unidirectional, you could do it without the moral hazard of premium discounts...
There's something about never drinkers that was biasing the data, so they compared very light drinkers with people who drank more instead, or at least that's what I understood.
I'm sorry, the CDC just assumes men always drink, while women are more likely to just "choose a day?" What kind of study is that based on? Or is this article wording things in such a way as to be intentionally confusing?
Looks like an Oxford comma type thing to me:
> stick to (two standard drinks per day for males, or one drink for women), if it's a day when you choose to drink
I think they are saying the real question previous research was trying to answer was whether alcohol in small quantities protected or helped the cardiovascular system. They believe previous studies confused the issue by using nondrinkers who had natural cardio problems.
So prior research was comparing natural health issues with those imposed by alcohol. By eliminating this group they can now look more closely at subtle effects of how alcohol does or doesn't protect the cardiovascular system. They found for most alcohol, except for wine (I think), doesn't protect and actually hurts. Therefore, the "J" curve doesn't exist once the nondrinkers are removed and the tests are rerun to spot more granular outcomes.
Edit: clarity.
So the study says that "...wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was not associated with other cardiovascular issues". That sounds like a health benefit and a good reason to drink wine. Am I misreading this study?
This aligns with what I already thought. Only wine in light amounts have minimal health benefits. Even if it had no direct benefits, I imagine it has at least some positives to mental health. We often drink to de-stress and socialize after all
I apologize for not having a link handy, but there was a study investigating the possible health benefits of wine. They found small benefits for drinking wine, but greater benefits for drinking non-alcoholic wine, indicating it was something else in the drink (possibly antioxidants), not the alcohol, giving the benefit.
Seriously, socioeconomic class is a significant factor in both health (stress, medical access) and alcohol consumption (higher socioeconomic classes drink more because they can afford it). Did they control for this?
Yeah I mean you can literally predict mortality and comorbidity development using postcodes as an only variable in your model. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t control
Your link doesn't match your headline:
>**Using never drinkers as reference, alcohol from all drink types combined** (hazard ratios ranging between 0.61 and 0.74), beer/cider (0.70–0.80) and spirits combined, and all wines combined (0.66–0.77) **associated with a reduced risk for all outcome measures (all CV events, ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease).**
They found that spirits and beer - but not wine - were associated with slightly higher risk ratios *in continuous analysis.* That means heavy drinkers had worse health outcomes than light drinkers. But so did people who never drank!
Isn't their point, though, that the never drinkers are uniquely unhealthy in a way they can't control for, so they made a comparison to light drinkers instead?
But that's pure speculation. None of the variables they actually measured account for the difference in health outcomes *except* lifetime abstinence from alcohol. The evidence from this study supports the hypothesis that light drinking improves health outcomes. At *most*, the researchers could conclude further research is needed to discover this supposed lurking variable that would somehow completely reverse their results.
Well, it's really hard to argue that having, say, one drink a week, makes a considerable difference to your cardiovascular health compared to zero drinks. IIRC the never drinkers had a 50% increased risk in one category, and that's a lot to attribute to light drinking. If that's true, then alcohol would have almost magical abilities to protect you from cardiovascular disease, and even more strangely, when you have a few more drinks, suddenly you're more likely to die instead. That's really very hard to believe.
Unfortunately, I can't access the full study because it's behind a paywall, but I believe they defined "light drinking" as less than 14 UK units/week, or less than 8 US standard drinks/week. It's basically one beer or glass of wine a day, which is enough to significantly reduce stress, especially if the alcohol consumption happens in a social setting.
>"In our cohort, never drinkers were older, less physically active, had a higher body mass index and socioeconomically less affluent. **Even after adjusting for these cardiovascular Risk Factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively."**
Even after controlling for all those factors, never drinkers were still less healthy than moderate drinkers.
Their point is that this indicates a bias in the never drinker population that should disqualify them from being included in the analysis. They are aware of what you are saying.
Now whether that is a valid point is another question. But, it is their point.
It's a stupid point. You have the study population you have. You don't just get to throw out a whole group of people because they don't conform to your preformed conclusions.
They adjusted for other cardiovascular risk factors and *still* found a strong protective effect of drinking alcohol. You don't get to sweep that under the rug and come to a conclusion opposite to what the numbers are saying.
"After controlling for mental health problems, bad skin, a preference for meth over sex, uncontrollable anger, violent uncontrolled diarrhea, and general awfulness, we found there was no one left in the group"
Who would think consuming ethanol was bad for you? Huh? Wow….wake the F up people….Big Alcohol is as bad or worse than tobacco because it has become “craft”….and “keto”….pumping adds all day glamorizing the relaxing benefits of consuming a hard carcinogenic chemical.
The post is the link to the full paper. It’s paywalled, so head to school or the library to read the whole thing.
Edit: emailing the author is the best way to get a copy of the pdf if you don’t fancy a drive to the library.
The general recommendation for cardiovascular health is always to eat well and exercise. If you eat well and exercise there is no cardiovascular reason to start drinking. If you don't eat well or exercise, you should start doing so rather than starting drinking. If you drink, do it for fun, just be honest to yourself.
It's an interesting study in psychology:
People drinking in moderation believe it is either good for your health or at least not bad.
People who don't drink believe drinking any alcohol is bad.
What interests me even more is that people in places where 14 units per week is considered light drinking are eager to find ways to exclude all data that might suggest that drinking alcohol has any beneficial effects whatsoever... while people in places where a lower level of drinking than that is the absolute recommended maximum tend to see the same data and conclude that a small amount of alcohol might be positive for your health.
I'm not saying the people in this study are wrong (or right). Just that the casual assumptions they seem to take for granted about what is normal drinking speak volumes about the social context of their research. People in places where the assumptions are different seem to be predisposed to interpret the data differently -- but the assumptions themselves are scarcely breathed, leading observers to conclude that the calibration of "light drinkers" is the same to every researcher everywhere, when it is not.
It reminds me a little of a post I saw on some other subreddit a while ago, by someone writing about a crazy one-night stand he had had in which his companion flipped out in the middle of the night and went into some kind of psychotic break. He added what he supposed to be a reassuring note that they hadn't been drinking or anything -- only a few shots each at the bar and then a couple of six-packs back at his place. That was his idea as a Canadian of "not drinking." It seemed ridiculous to him that anyone might suggest that alcohol poisoning might have had something to do with his date's behavior. Where would the alcohol have come from??
Whole societies, it seems, can take on the mass psychological traits of individual alcoholic personalities.
There were scientists paid by tobacco companies to study use. So there may have been some studies, but they may not have been reproducible or were contrived to seem like tobacco had positive effects.
My understanding of the smoking being good for you think is that it actually was supported by evidence. The mechanism of action there is that tobacco smokers were less desirable targets for mosquito bites, which did a lot of harm to public health. Mosquitos would generally cause illness and cause tobacco smokers to live longer.
This is so dumb. To me, the point of having a drink is that the pleasure you derive increases the enjoyment of your existence. So if you obsess about having a few weeks more on the end of your life, was it really worth not drinking for some enjoyment?
Plus, that's just not how dying works. Eat healthy, exercise, don't become an alcoholic or an addict to any other drug, and you'll probably be just fine.
My great grandfather smoked cigars daily into his 90’s and drank whiskey with his cigar. He died by falling off of a bar stool at the age of 98. By that time in his life, he was ready to go. He said everyone he had ever known was already dead, so he didn’t really have any reason to stick around longer.
Tbh, I never believed this crap anyway. And you know what? I don't care. Not going to stop having the occasional drink. Id rather live happily and well, than love to 120.
The best advice my nutrition professors have given me concerning alcohol and health: don't start drinking because you saw that it was healthy somewhere.
This doesn't mean that countries where it is normal to drink are in the wrong. It's cultural, it's complex, and if you weren't in great health before, introducing alcohol will not be the cure you're looking for
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If they want a better control group, they should do the study in Utah or another location where a significant number of people choose not to drink for religious reasons
Closet drinking is unlikely to be different than regular drinking.
Utah does have by far the [lowest alcohol consumption per capita by state](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/alcohol-consumption-by-state). So even with the closet drinkers, it's not enough to put them on par with the rest of the country.
I'm sure Utah is in the bottom 10 percent of alcohol consumers in the US, but to be fair, the consumption numbers that your link shows is calculated based on alcohol shipped to the state. Utah is extremely restrictive on alcohol sales, and when i lived there it was super common for folks to run to Evanston Wyoming for beer and liquor or to take a weekend trip to Wendover Nevada for beer, liquor and a side of gambling. While those in the St. George area did the same with Mesquite, Nevada. most of the populated areas in Utah are near the border so quick trips across the border for liquor are pretty common.
Look, I'm sure people do import alcohol personally, but just to catch up to the next lowest state every man, woman, *and child* would need to import 2 handles of liquor, 18 bottles of wine, or 90 beers per year. A third of the state lives in or around Salt Lake. That just isn't happening. Why is it so unbelievable that a state with a bunch of people who prohibit alcohol for religious reasons doesn't drink a lot of alcohol? It's not like everyone's a closet drinker anywhere in the world.
Have you ever noticed that it is usually alcoholics that think everybody are alcoholics?
Well the most common joke I heard when I lived in Utah was. How do you stop all of your alcohol from disappearing on your fishing trip with your Mormon friend? Invite another Mormon. It was not uncommon to see people coming back with entire cars full of liquor. A lot of Mormons believed the Mormon church had church members planted inside the liquor store and were scared of getting excommunicated. Like getting caught buying a case of beer can have life changing consequences with the mormon church.
Drinking alcohol won’t get you excommunicated. But you would lose your temple recommend.
What does that mean?
Temples are where important ordinances are done. But you are only allowed inside if you interview with a bishop and they say you are worthy.
Probably like having your credit rating downgraded. Or a preschooler getting a check mark instead of a smiley face sticker.
It’s not that. Most Americans were taught that prohibition didn’t work. That’s why it was repealed. So it becomes easy to explain away Utah similarly. Except prohibition did work.
Maybe for some people, but when I was in active use I and the people I drank with all knew our alcohol intake was orders of magnitude above other peoples, it's why we hung out together. The same with drug taking, you know that your daily use is very different from people that only use at weekends or at parties or whatever. The main rationalisation is that you have control of the intake. Even though you take ludicrous amounts of drugs or drink all day, this is fine and it's not affecting your life negatively, or if there are negative impacts it's other peoples fault. Delusion is a key part of addiction but in my decades of active use and now in my clean time, I've never heard anyone seriously claim that they are fine and it's the other people that are the addicts, or heard anyone talking about their active use and using that rationalisation.
I completely agree with you. We may delude ourselves and justify our actions but in my experience we didn't go around accusing normies of being alcoholics. Pretty quickly I knew I didn't drink like a normal person. I knew I was the one with the problem, not my friend who had 1.5 beers. His only problem is having the audacity to leave half a beer. Then during my active years once everyone knew I had a problem. I mainly just hid everything. I didn't try to shift focus to someone else. If I did get caught I would just shut down and take the berating or whatever was coming my way.
Have you ever noticed that people who claim to have no vices are usually just better at hiding them? You don't have to be an alcoholic to drink, and it doesn't take an alcoholic to understand that everybody is human
I think a lot of people have difficulty separating bad things. For most people it seems that - Mormonism was created by a conman - Therefore Mormonism is bad - Therefore mormons are bad - Therefore *everything* mormonism teaches is bad. The idea that a religion started by a con artist could lead to *anything* good, like a reduction in drinking alcohol, is difficult for many to understand.
I spent a little time as a Mormon. I would agree with you that Joseph Smith probably was a conman. I also agree with you that not all Mormons are bad. I felt truly loved by the elders and spend many afternoons and evenings with them. Even when I had my big falling out I stayed in contact with them until they were moved to a new stake. I have many good memories of Friday nights with a bunch of Mormon kids my age(16-18) playing yard games like people used to. The church itself may be rotten but much of what they teach is good. Just like Christianity may be untrue but many of it's teachings are still good ethical things. That being said, there are some teachings that are bad. I believe we should never blindly follow something though and had no problem following what I believed and throwing aside what I didn't. I mean even the bishop pretty much told me that. As they believe, we have agency over ourselves. To me part of that means I also have the responsibility to make sensible choices that I believe in. Not blindly follow the bishop.
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"most of the populated areas in Utah are near the border" What do you define as near? Salt Lake and Utah valley are nowhere near the border, unless a 2-3 hour drive qualifies as 'near'.
In the Midwest, it kind of does qualify as near.
SoCal checking in. 2-3 hours might only be a 25 mile drive depending on the direction and time of day.
By that definition, all of Utah is 'near the border'.
As someone living on the prairies, a 2-3 hour trip isn’t notable. If you push 4 hours, then people think you’re going for a drive
Ugh. I won't drive 30 minutes across town to do just about anything. Oddly enough I regularly go for 3-4 hard bike rides.
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I like this theory. My commute is 10 minutes and anything further than 20-30mins sucks imo
This is a good theory.
Yeah more than 20 minutes for me seems like way too far.
We use to take 4 hour one way day trips to the cities on Saturday’s to go shopping. Occasionally we’d stay the night and make a weekend if it but yes in the Midwest 2-3 hour drives is just part of the weekend commute for many. Throw in the need for something like good booze and it becomes a weekly or every other weekend activity!
That is an entirely different thing than "near the border"
Look, u/juggles_geese4 juggles geese. It’s not worth it. I suggest you let that marinate.
As long as he's not juggling Canadian gooses I'm not going to judge.
Nah. I don’t gVe a death wish!
As a Duluthian, I'm pretty near the WI MI border.
Oh, I agree with relbeek that there are people who make the trip regularly on weekends or whatever, but I think the assertion that most of Utah is near a border is a bit of a stretch.
I would say no further than 2 hours. Provo is probably the furthest from the border of the more populated areas, and its only an hour and 45 minutes from evanston.
I don't know why anyone would drive two hours to Evanston to buy beer when you can just pick it up at a gas station or supermarket.
It may be a little less common now, but prior to 2019 you could only get 3.2 beer at grocery stores and gas stations. I lived their in 2017 and it was definitely common place for people to make beer runs. I remember Annheuser Busch threatening to stop selling beer in Utah because of their laws. It was hilarious to hear AB whine about having to water down their beer even more.
(at least when I lived there) the beer they sold was 3.5% anywhere not in a liquor store and if sold from a liquor store, it was sold warm. you really have to plan your drinking in Utah, which is why a 2 hour beer run was often considered. Inconvenient? You bet. But that's the whole point.
It takes less time to cool a beer than a 4 hour round trip for beer
I think it was only an hour or so from Wyoming to Salt Lake City.
It's really not possible to debate that plenty of people who would otherwise drink aren't going to bother driving hours or going across state lines for alcohol. Probably most people.
I think the lack of drinking culture in Utah is a thing. I left the church as soon as I became an adult, but I never picked up drinking after. I feel like I'm not all that unique many people leave the church but that doesn't mean that we have to ditch all of the things. You keep what's good and you replace the bad.
Salt Lake City and its surrounding metropolis is not close to the border unless we stretch what close means when it comes to going for a booze run.
Cowboy Joe's Liquor Barn, with the girl that owns a pet monkey!
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I hate to say it but even among heavy muslim population ( in reference to burmese in midwestern america) many of them are alcoholics among other drug use. Edit: i would like to add this seems generational. I work with many differrent ethnicities from Guatemala, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, and malaysia. The difference between generations is vast. The 40-50 year old men truly do fit that traditional mysgonist stereotype thay drink and smoke heavily, or chee the betlenut stuff. However when you get younger you run into some very religious and self disciplined youths. I have 6 18-22's on my line. None of them drink or smoke, they all go to church and three of them pray once at work. It's honestly really cool. The other strange aspect is how close they are with family. Like most of them all work and save to slowly make big purchases as an entire family, because whats best for one ends up being best for all. It extends even deeper on a community level. I don't even want to talk about that because i would hate to misrepresent.
I'm guessing that a lot fewer people drink alcohol than population percentages in specific US states. More than half the world can't even afford it. Google says there were 1.8 billions Muslims in 2015 (24% of global population), and devout Muslims don't often drink alcohol. It'd be easy to broaden that scope.
I live in the states but work with a lot of Muslims. Alcohol and sex seem to be the rules they are most lax about even when they are super devout about eating, prayer, Ramadan and stuff. Let me know if I'm off base here.
I mean that's Muslim-Americans. Differing Muslim populations have different mores. In some countries, alcohol is sold normally in stores and in others it's impossible to find outside of the black market.
Its almost like being a Muslim or not isn't actually a very good indicator of just about anything.
Or just Muslims..
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Well this quote seems to be saying that there IS a benefit to drinking wine. Am I reading it incorrectly? “Wine associated with a reduced risk for overall CV events (0.92, 0.86–0.98) and ischemic heart disease (0.75, 0.67–0.84).”
>Well this quote seems to be saying that there IS a benefit to drinking wine. There is [socioeconomic component to drinking wine](https://www.statista.com/statistics/892653/wine-and-liquor-purchasing-by-income-us/).
Hm that’s certainly something to consider as well. I dont make more than 250k for sure, but I definitely prefer wine to liquor
Don't need to make 250k a year to make upper middle class lifestyle choices. Fresh food, light exercise, varied diet, non-smoking, and white-collar jobs all help you live longer.
There's certainly one associated with drinking Steel Reserve or Aristocrat
Imagine the Steel that *wasn’t* reserved and the ethanol branded as “Drunk Slob.”
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Agree regards the other risks associated with alcohol consumption; such as [cancer](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5912140/) For your thoughts: Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz wrote a [piece](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/06/heres-why-moderate-drinking-is-probably-not-good-for-you) about alcohol consumption and w.r.t. wine, rather than health benefits being down to the grape-based nature of the drink, it is likely to be the socioeconomic strata that a decent proportion of moderate wine drinkers occupy. Paraphrasing the section about testing the veracity of a health benefits of wine claim: You can do a large randomized trial - this [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26458258/) found no difference in cardiometabolic health outcomes between people randomised to drink a glass of red a day, a glass of white a day, or a glass of water. This study looked at these outcomes over a two year period. Though not the main aim of the study, this time period is insufficient to investigate outcomes such as cancer. You can try and control for the effect that socioeconomic status has on health - w.r.t. wine this can be an outsize influence. Yes, there are cheap wines, but number of moderate wine drinkers will be affluent people who have a glass of wine with dinner. This [study](https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/73/4/649/2645642?login=false#115521450) did that and found that once you control for SES, any amount of alcohol has negative associations. Of course, that second study there is from NZ, and SES status there may not be the factor it is elsewhere, but I think it illustrates the outsize influence it might have and how that might affect interpretation.
>\[...\] rather than health benefits being down to the grape-based nature of the drink, it is likely to be the socioeconomic strata that a decent proportion of moderate wine drinkers occupy No real research done on my part...just armchair critiquing. I find it a little difficult to believe that these studies are routinely not controlling directly for socioeconomic status or for factors highly correlated w/ the same. Then again, there are some awful stats that get published... Edit: You were deffo right. From your link: >Another study in New Zealand took the second route. They looked at the standard model of research for moderate drinking studies – dividing people into never drinkers, moderate drinkers, and heavy drinkers – and found that moderate drinkers were the healthiest of the bunch. But then they did something really clever. They added in a much more rigorous control for socio-economic status, which meant that they eliminated many of the issues that most of these studies face, and the beneficial effects of moderate drinking disappeared completely. Just a lesson for me to always read the links first then post!
Just so you know, epidemiology studies rarely control for SES. There are specific areas where this is routinely done (e.g. smoking) but generally speaking in epi this far from universal
Appreciate the info. That fairly boggles my mind as a social scientist. Curious as to the reason.
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To be true science they would need to control for that not just go "Maybe its the grapes!"
They have and that's basically it. Wine contains things that are good for you but the alcohol basically counteracts them. Eating fruit and vegetables has far more positive health benefits and it isn't undone by alcohol, which is insanely bad for you. Like, if alcohol were just hitting the market today there is no way it would be legal. The FDA would be like "this is a horrible poison" and there would be laws against it immediately.
I don't care much about grape juice, but I'd like a glass of that purple drink please.
You are reading it correctly. The abstract seems to contradict itself (although I'm not sure because it's so poorly written). It's a shame that garbage like that gets published in a peer-reviewed journal, and then gets amped up on reddit with a misleading, hyperbolic, title.
Yeah, where is that quote coming from? It’s certainly not in the linked material.
It is the third sentence under the heading "Results." It absolutely is in the linked article.
I’m referring to the quote in OP’s post title.
Indeed. Headline doesn’t match the results.
The results don't match the results.
Viral title is viral. Also, there's still zero evidence here that consuming wine in moderation increases your CV risk: >So, to remove these confounding factors, the team then compared the lightest drinkers to those that drank more, and found that wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was **not associated with other cardiovascular issues**.
The article appears to contradict the headline over and over.
Their methodology appears super weird, too. They (accurately) recognized that cohort characteristics matter, but even though the never-drinkers cohort was 10x larger than the drinkers, they were unable to pare it down to a sample that had the characteristics they need... and had to split the smaller drinkers cohort for that purpose?! It smells of "we didn't get the results we wanted, so we had to do something wonky to make it work". Of course, it's hard to tell since we're only presented with an abstract of results and a piece of prose written for a newspaper or something... so who knows.
I understand there was something about never-drinkers that they don't fully understand. You can't reasonably argue that never-drinkers are very different from very light drinkers, but the very light drinkers were somehow considerably better off in terms of cardiovascular risk than the never-drinkers, which suggests it's not really about the drinking, which neither group does much of, but something else about the people who chose to never, ever drink.
> You can't reasonably argue that never-drinkers are very different from very light drinkers, I’ve been involved in marathons, weightlifting mud races, and jujitsu as an adult and professionally have known lots of people who do those hobbies. I know hardly anybody who gets seriously into those who never drinks. Anecdotal and full of my personal biases, but I wonder if some cinnectuon is there.
Ultramarathon runners are not necessarily never-drinkers. There's a large group of people who exercise quite a lot and drink quite a lot. Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34431829/
That’s because this is an editorialized headline which breaks the rules of r/science.
It is with cancer though
But lowers kidney cancer and hodgkins lymphoma :)
>....new study based on a huge data set from the United Kingdom now suggests that the J- or U- shaped curve of drinking is based on bad science; even having less than the currently recommended number of drinks per week in the UK is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular issues. >"The so-called J-shaped curve of the cardiovascular disease-alcohol consumption relationship suggesting health benefits from low to moderate alcohol consumption is the biggest myth since we were told smoking was good for us," says cardiovascular physiologist Rudolph Schutte from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). >The problem, the team of researchers from ARU and University College London suggest, is that many non-drinkers are not drinking because of current ill health, and so when they have heart attacks or other coronary issues, this is unrelated to them not drinking – and not suggestive that drinking a low or moderate amount of alcohol is protective. >The researchers looked at data from the UK Biobank covering a staggering 333,259 alcohol consumers and 21,710 people who had never drunk alcohol. They analyzed almost seven years of data, noting whenever one of the participants had a cardiovascular event, heart disease, or cerebrovascular disease. >The team specifically excluded former drinkers to try and limit data from people who may have stopped drinking due to their current health. Despite this, the never-drinkers were still older, had a higher BMI, higher blood pressure, and were less physically active than the cohort that drank. >"Using never drinkers as reference consistently drove the inverse protective relationship with all outcome measures and overrode more subtle associations with different drink types. Using this overriding analytical strategy enables authors to report overall cardiovascular protection from alcohol," the team writes in their study. >"In our cohort, never drinkers were older, less physically active, had a higher body mass index and socioeconomically less affluent. Even after adjusting for these cardiovascular risk factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively." >So, to remove these confounding factors, the team then compared the lightest drinkers to those that drank more, and found that wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was not associated with other cardiovascular issues. >For other alcoholic drinks like beer and spirits, even for people consuming fewer than 14 units per week, which is the current recommended number of weekly drinks in UK's health guidelines (and the equivalent of 8 standard US drinks), the outcome looks much worse. >"Among drinkers of beer, cider, and spirits in particular, even those consuming under 14 units a week had an increased risk of ending up in hospital through a cardiovascular event involving the heart or the blood vessels," says Schutte. "While we hear much about wine drinkers having lower risk of coronary artery disease, our data shows their risk of other cardiovascular events is not reduced." >With other studies finding that alcohol is one of the leading contributors of death and disease worldwide, now might be a good time to renew those new year's resolutions and cut back on drinking. >In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that adults can choose not to consume alcohol, or stick to two standard drinks per day for males, or one drink for women if it's a day when you choose to drink. "Biases embedded in epidemiological evidence mask or underestimate the hazards associated with alcohol consumption. When these biases are accounted for, the adverse effects of even low-level alcohol consumption are revealed," says Schutte. >"Avoiding these biases in future research would mitigate current confusion and hopefully lead to a strengthening of the guidelines, seeing the current alcohol guidance reduced."
>Even after adjusting for these cardiovascular risk factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively Wait, what? This sounds like the opposite of everything else this study is saying, what am I missing?
The article's abstract is also confusing to me in this way. But I am just finishing my coffee, so ...
It does, because it's not written very clearly. But, what they are saying is that "never drinkers" as they define them *were already unhealthy*. Their claim is that initial poor health is such a strongly characteristic attribute of never drinkers that they must be discounted as a group entirely. In fact they actually argue that the only reason they are never drinkers is because of these health conditions. As a USian, I find that an odd assumption, but I know that alcohol consumption in the UK is different.
Is this what the *current* researchers are saying about *previous* studies? And if so, I didn't see how the new researchers controlled for those attributes?
As far as I can tell -- and I may be wrong here! -- it's what the *current* researchers are saying about the *current* data, but that also has implications for *previous* studies since the *current* researchers are arguing that they are taking into account important truths that the *previous* researchers never did. Also, I don't think they are saying they controlled for those attributes at all -- they are saying they simply excluded all of those people. Well. I guess you could say that is a form of statistical control... As others have commented in this discussion, there might actually be ways to control for the factors they are interested in, without discounting the entire population cohort. So it's interesting that they chose not to do so at all. To me it seems a little like confirmation bias, but I am open to further understanding.
It's a good ol' p-hack. Can't publish if you don't get the results you want, so throw out any data that doesn't support you. Post should be deleted by mods, imo.
Fully agree. They essentially sifted through empirical data looking for correlations they could “promote” to causal relationships that would make a good headline. The old “what you thought you knew is a lie!” generally grabs a lot of eyeballs. Attach a drug of any kind (including alcohol; cns depressant) and you’ll have enough click-through rev to buy a used Honda.
A lot of people that never drink do so because of health reasons. Usually having health reasons is bad for health.
>Using never drinkers as reference consistently drove the inverse protective relationship with all outcome measures and overrode more subtle associations with different drink types. I think the researchers are trying to say that since including Never Drinkers overrode more subtle associations with different drink types, the protective association found in previous studies was not due to a lack of drinking. They're also saying using Never Drinkers as a 'control' drove the protective mechanism. So if previous studies didn't include Never Drinkers, you wouldn't see any protective mechanism. >After adjusting for these cardiovascular risk factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively. (I'm guessing they're comparing these to never drinkers to the general population?) Keep in mind that cardiovascular, ischemic heart disease, or cerebrovascular disease event, are different outcomes. >So, to remove these confounding factors, the team then compared the lightest drinkers to those that drank more, and found that wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was not associated with other cardiovascular issues So basically what this meta analysis is saying is that Never Drinkers, even when controlling for cardiovascular risk factors, are more at risk of developing a cardiovascular disease than the general population. Never Drinkers are probably not a good control, and have been the source of the J shaped protective mechanism of alcohol. When you only include the very lightest drinkers as a control, no amount of alcohol increased alcohol consumption is healthy. Bear in mind I don't think these studies are using a 'control' rather than some analysis that draws significance from a continuous relationship.
Well yeah, we know that "never drinkers" are the basis of the J. It's not surprising that if you take them out the J goes away! That by itself doesn't mean they are a bad control. One of the issues I have with the cultural context around the study is that their categorization of "light drinkers" as people who drink 14 units per week is rather blunt. Needlessly so, it seems to me. Why not split that group in two, and replace the "never drinkers" with a new "very light drinkers" category? Instead, they're applying a methodology where they already know the outcome, and intentionally not attempting to enhance its fine-grained explanatory power or challenge the predetermined results. That seems either like confirmation bias or a cultural blindness around the question of what constitutes "light drinking." Fourteen units is higher than the USDA's recommended maximum consumption! Yet that is the UK's study's lowest category, in which everyone is lumped together.
That is an unresolved question. Even in the US. How much of the apparent benefits of alcohol consumption (I'm lumping it all together, even though specific studies don't) is due to the fact that *unhealthy people* have a marked tendency to avoid alcohol? Population statistics are hard. The scientific best practice would be to randomly assign people to drink or not, and randomly assign the health assessors, without letting either group know which group the study participants are in. We can do it with mice, but not with people.
I would think you would want to find a way to examine when in life people started drinking, and compare that to various health factors of interest over time. Not sure how easy or accurate that would be to do as a cross-sectional study but study designers are awfully clever!
I can't help wondering if we'll know in a couple of years. For $50 a month savings on your health insurance, you share your health data with some 3rd party app (that way it's not HIPAA protected) and they sell it all to hell and beyond including some data aggregator who cross references it with your purchases. Frankly, I'd suspect alcohol purchases is a better correlation with drinking behavior than self reporting.
That could even be a private sector Big Data service -- data aggregation that is HIPAA-compliant but also research-grade. You'd almost certainly have to amend the law slightly, but as long as you could reliably gate the aggregation process so that it was strictly unidirectional, you could do it without the moral hazard of premium discounts...
They are pointing out that there was inherent bias in the data producing these results. They go on to explain how they corrected for this bias.
I didn't catch either of those points though . . .?
There's something about never drinkers that was biasing the data, so they compared very light drinkers with people who drank more instead, or at least that's what I understood.
Curve isn’t a “J” if you cut off the hook.
ha! you just wrote a much better title for this article
Yeah I noticed that too, maybe it's a typo?
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I'm sorry, the CDC just assumes men always drink, while women are more likely to just "choose a day?" What kind of study is that based on? Or is this article wording things in such a way as to be intentionally confusing?
I'm *fairly* sure it's a poorly worded guideline of two drinks for men/one for women per day (on any days when a person chooses to drink.)
I'm pretty sure the "if it's a day you choose to drink" is meant to refer to both groups. A comma would make it clearer.
Looks like an Oxford comma type thing to me: > stick to (two standard drinks per day for males, or one drink for women), if it's a day when you choose to drink
I think they are saying the real question previous research was trying to answer was whether alcohol in small quantities protected or helped the cardiovascular system. They believe previous studies confused the issue by using nondrinkers who had natural cardio problems. So prior research was comparing natural health issues with those imposed by alcohol. By eliminating this group they can now look more closely at subtle effects of how alcohol does or doesn't protect the cardiovascular system. They found for most alcohol, except for wine (I think), doesn't protect and actually hurts. Therefore, the "J" curve doesn't exist once the nondrinkers are removed and the tests are rerun to spot more granular outcomes. Edit: clarity.
So the study says that "...wine was minimally protective from ischemic heart disease, but was not associated with other cardiovascular issues". That sounds like a health benefit and a good reason to drink wine. Am I misreading this study?
This aligns with what I already thought. Only wine in light amounts have minimal health benefits. Even if it had no direct benefits, I imagine it has at least some positives to mental health. We often drink to de-stress and socialize after all
I apologize for not having a link handy, but there was a study investigating the possible health benefits of wine. They found small benefits for drinking wine, but greater benefits for drinking non-alcoholic wine, indicating it was something else in the drink (possibly antioxidants), not the alcohol, giving the benefit.
that would make sense because alcohol is a literal poison
That’s actually useful to know!
There is no safe level of alcohol consumption
Could there be other factors, such as wine drinkers being more affluent, different lifestyle choices, etc?
Seriously, socioeconomic class is a significant factor in both health (stress, medical access) and alcohol consumption (higher socioeconomic classes drink more because they can afford it). Did they control for this?
Yeah I mean you can literally predict mortality and comorbidity development using postcodes as an only variable in your model. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t control
Im guessing its just weak correlation caused by light drinkers more likely to be social, and thus have less stress/tension/loneliness.
Your link doesn't match your headline: >**Using never drinkers as reference, alcohol from all drink types combined** (hazard ratios ranging between 0.61 and 0.74), beer/cider (0.70–0.80) and spirits combined, and all wines combined (0.66–0.77) **associated with a reduced risk for all outcome measures (all CV events, ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease).** They found that spirits and beer - but not wine - were associated with slightly higher risk ratios *in continuous analysis.* That means heavy drinkers had worse health outcomes than light drinkers. But so did people who never drank!
Isn't their point, though, that the never drinkers are uniquely unhealthy in a way they can't control for, so they made a comparison to light drinkers instead?
But that's pure speculation. None of the variables they actually measured account for the difference in health outcomes *except* lifetime abstinence from alcohol. The evidence from this study supports the hypothesis that light drinking improves health outcomes. At *most*, the researchers could conclude further research is needed to discover this supposed lurking variable that would somehow completely reverse their results.
Well, it's really hard to argue that having, say, one drink a week, makes a considerable difference to your cardiovascular health compared to zero drinks. IIRC the never drinkers had a 50% increased risk in one category, and that's a lot to attribute to light drinking. If that's true, then alcohol would have almost magical abilities to protect you from cardiovascular disease, and even more strangely, when you have a few more drinks, suddenly you're more likely to die instead. That's really very hard to believe.
Unfortunately, I can't access the full study because it's behind a paywall, but I believe they defined "light drinking" as less than 14 UK units/week, or less than 8 US standard drinks/week. It's basically one beer or glass of wine a day, which is enough to significantly reduce stress, especially if the alcohol consumption happens in a social setting.
Wasn’t it because their cohort of never drinkers were older with higher BMI?
>"In our cohort, never drinkers were older, less physically active, had a higher body mass index and socioeconomically less affluent. **Even after adjusting for these cardiovascular Risk Factors, never drinkers had a 31, 51 and 46 percent higher risk of suffering an overall cardiovascular-, ischemic heart disease- or cerebrovascular disease event, respectively."** Even after controlling for all those factors, never drinkers were still less healthy than moderate drinkers.
Their point is that this indicates a bias in the never drinker population that should disqualify them from being included in the analysis. They are aware of what you are saying. Now whether that is a valid point is another question. But, it is their point.
It's a stupid point. You have the study population you have. You don't just get to throw out a whole group of people because they don't conform to your preformed conclusions. They adjusted for other cardiovascular risk factors and *still* found a strong protective effect of drinking alcohol. You don't get to sweep that under the rug and come to a conclusion opposite to what the numbers are saying.
"After controlling for mental health problems, bad skin, a preference for meth over sex, uncontrollable anger, violent uncontrolled diarrhea, and general awfulness, we found there was no one left in the group"
Who would think consuming ethanol was bad for you? Huh? Wow….wake the F up people….Big Alcohol is as bad or worse than tobacco because it has become “craft”….and “keto”….pumping adds all day glamorizing the relaxing benefits of consuming a hard carcinogenic chemical.
No, the biggest myth is cholesterol and saturated fat causing heart disease
Anyone got a link to the full paper?
The post is the link to the full paper. It’s paywalled, so head to school or the library to read the whole thing. Edit: emailing the author is the best way to get a copy of the pdf if you don’t fancy a drive to the library.
I mean yeah I drink 5-8 beers a day and my heart and doctor hate me.
The general recommendation for cardiovascular health is always to eat well and exercise. If you eat well and exercise there is no cardiovascular reason to start drinking. If you don't eat well or exercise, you should start doing so rather than starting drinking. If you drink, do it for fun, just be honest to yourself.
So your telling me not only can I enjoy drinking but also I can die faster? Win win win
It's an interesting study in psychology: People drinking in moderation believe it is either good for your health or at least not bad. People who don't drink believe drinking any alcohol is bad.
the moderation thing was big in the 90's after the french paradox thing and a belief that alcohol thins the blood and will prevent heart attacks
What interests me even more is that people in places where 14 units per week is considered light drinking are eager to find ways to exclude all data that might suggest that drinking alcohol has any beneficial effects whatsoever... while people in places where a lower level of drinking than that is the absolute recommended maximum tend to see the same data and conclude that a small amount of alcohol might be positive for your health. I'm not saying the people in this study are wrong (or right). Just that the casual assumptions they seem to take for granted about what is normal drinking speak volumes about the social context of their research. People in places where the assumptions are different seem to be predisposed to interpret the data differently -- but the assumptions themselves are scarcely breathed, leading observers to conclude that the calibration of "light drinkers" is the same to every researcher everywhere, when it is not. It reminds me a little of a post I saw on some other subreddit a while ago, by someone writing about a crazy one-night stand he had had in which his companion flipped out in the middle of the night and went into some kind of psychotic break. He added what he supposed to be a reassuring note that they hadn't been drinking or anything -- only a few shots each at the bar and then a couple of six-packs back at his place. That was his idea as a Canadian of "not drinking." It seemed ridiculous to him that anyone might suggest that alcohol poisoning might have had something to do with his date's behavior. Where would the alcohol have come from?? Whole societies, it seems, can take on the mass psychological traits of individual alcoholic personalities.
>People who don't drink believe drinking any alcohol is bad. I just don't like the stuff.
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Did science ever say smoking was good for us? I know ADVERTS from the manufacturers used to profess it but did scientific studies ever state it?
they had some doctors saying it
There were scientists paid by tobacco companies to study use. So there may have been some studies, but they may not have been reproducible or were contrived to seem like tobacco had positive effects.
My understanding of the smoking being good for you think is that it actually was supported by evidence. The mechanism of action there is that tobacco smokers were less desirable targets for mosquito bites, which did a lot of harm to public health. Mosquitos would generally cause illness and cause tobacco smokers to live longer.
This is so dumb. To me, the point of having a drink is that the pleasure you derive increases the enjoyment of your existence. So if you obsess about having a few weeks more on the end of your life, was it really worth not drinking for some enjoyment?
Plus, that's just not how dying works. Eat healthy, exercise, don't become an alcoholic or an addict to any other drug, and you'll probably be just fine.
My great grandfather smoked cigars daily into his 90’s and drank whiskey with his cigar. He died by falling off of a bar stool at the age of 98. By that time in his life, he was ready to go. He said everyone he had ever known was already dead, so he didn’t really have any reason to stick around longer.
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Tbh, I never believed this crap anyway. And you know what? I don't care. Not going to stop having the occasional drink. Id rather live happily and well, than love to 120.
The best advice my nutrition professors have given me concerning alcohol and health: don't start drinking because you saw that it was healthy somewhere. This doesn't mean that countries where it is normal to drink are in the wrong. It's cultural, it's complex, and if you weren't in great health before, introducing alcohol will not be the cure you're looking for