Slashdot Mirror
Drinking Alcohol May Extend Your Life
Adolytsi writes "MSNBC has an interesting article on an Italian study on alcoholism. While the obvious notion of overconsumption of alcohol being detrimental to one's health is supported, apparently drinking it in moderation can actually extend your lifespan. A study on over 1 million drinkers and 94,000 deaths yielded the results: "According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol — up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women — reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent, the team reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
However, "things radically change" when consumption goes beyond these levels, study leader Dr. Augusto Di Castelnuovo, from Catholic University of Campobasso, said in a statement. Men who have more than four drinks per day and women who have more than two drinks per day not only lose the protection that alcohol affords, but they increase their risk of death, the data indicates.""
Four tumblers of middle-quality scotch?
I still find it interesting that at 18 you're allowed join the military and die but you're not allowed to drink alcohol.
I wondered if they remembered to take into account people who don't drink because of pre-existing health conditions that result in shorter life spans. That's a variable they tend to forget in these studies...
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
Clearly, from this study, if you're having 4 drinks a week, you DO have a drinking problem. Specifically, your problem is you aren't drinking enough.
This is only the 10,000th study done (this year) on this subject stating some good can come from drinking in moderation!
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
IIRC, that's four drinks every day, but only if you drink with your meals (presumably lunch and supper). Drinking outside of mealtime (bar hopping, happy hour after work, etc.) has a negative effect.
I always equivocate. Well, almost always.
What do you drink, Jack Daniels by the pint? Most people I know, even lightweights, can handle an aperitif or two, a couple of glasses of wine with a meal, maybe a brandy or whisky after, without being particularly drunk. So I guess it depends what you count as one drink, and how fast you're chucking them down.
Oh no... it's the future.
But unfortunately the correlation may not imply causation. i.e. people who live longer drink more, but not vice-versa.
Lotsa possible ways to spoil things.
Correlation does not imply causation. All we can say is that "people who drink a bit of alcohol tend to live longer," not that alcohol prolongs their lives. It could be that these individuals take the time to socialize and de-stress, which causes them to live longer. Or perhaps there are financial factors at play: someone who can afford to drink three or four bottles of wine a week is not likely to be living in abject poverty. Of course, it could also be that anti-oxidant properties of the beverages have a positive effect as well.
You're probably not far off. I know some wines have health benefits, but I'm guessing the biggest benefit from moderate drinking is that the drinker is more relaxed: stress is certainly no friend to health.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Finding out who paid for these studies and the publicizing of their results, is another story... With alcohol and wine lobbies strongly rooted in the french political life, and recently getting into academic funding, you should always follow the money before you make your mind about these studies...
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
anything that we enjoy in moderation is good for us. I think that we live longer if we have fun and enjoy ourselves.
Having a healthy outlook on life and enjoying good food, good drink and good times with others all help to contribute to this, whether it is over a drink, a meal or doing some activity; it does not really matter. The objective is to have a sense of achievement in our work and enjoy time with friends and family.
I imagine that drowning your daily woes with a lonely depressed drink everyday would actually shorten your life. However, sitting out in the sun enjoying a glass of wine or a beer with your wife or your friends and just generally relaxing, enjoying life will help you live longer.
My math says: Hard work + Fun (both in moderation...this is important)= Decrease stress = Joyful life = Live longer
Hard work is just an accumulation of the easy things that you didn't do when you should have.
Slashdot is such a troll. *sighs*
... whereas if you stop at that 4th beer, it shows some measure of self-control.
I guarantee you this has nothing to do with any "medical benefits" of alcohol, and everything to do with who knows when to stop drinking and who doesn't.
Think about it. You've had your fourth beer, you're feeling good, what do you do? Go for more pleasure at the risk of being sick, or stop where you're at?
If you're the kind of person who will keep going, you're more likely to drive too fast off a cliff, skydive every weekend, do as many kinds of drugs as you can find, put yourself into fights,
Self-control will keep you alive a lot better than 4 beers a day. I promise.
...drinking a moderate amount of alcohol -- up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women -- reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent... Yet we are told that 100% of humans eventually die from something. If the risk of every cause of death (which by definition must include alcohol related ones) is reduced by 18%, that difference must go somewhere.Must be reincarnation......
I think the moral is either: Don't drink the punch, or Let sleeping geeks lie.
Or lock your door.
One thing it's always important to consider when looking at the health consequences of a human-controllable factor such as drinking alcohol is: some people may make a decision about how much alcohol to drink and this decision is based on a reason related to their current health.
For example, those who are already unwell or have a chronic condition may well decide to avoid alcohol completely, or have this recommended to them by their doctors. This means that the future outcomes recorded for "those who do not drink, or who drink very little" can be biased to some extent by the fact that they are already at a higher risk of disease or death. Getting this sort of bias measured is incredibly difficult.
If this happens, then you get a mortality relationship which seems to be telling you: drinking almost nothing has a modest mortality rate (because it includes all those who have been avoid alcohol); a small amount of alcohol, consumed by largely health-conscious people leads to a lower mortality rate; then higher levels of alcohol lead to higher mortality rates. At face value, this suggests that "drinking a small amount of alcohol is good for you". While this may be true, you have to be very careful in interpreting the results.
Basically, this boils down to the difference between: some people get ill or die because they drink a lot, and some people drink very little because they are already ill.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
I don't have any statistics to back this up so this might be bogus but one thought came to mind was automobile accidents.
For several years I worked for an automobile towing company which was licensed to do all the towing for the area towns. Some of the more gruesome car accidents that involved a driver under the influence of alcohol walked away without a scratch on them, while other horrendous accidents with sober drivers either lead to a fatality or some serious injuries.
The accident scenes were disgusting and when the officer would tell me the driver walked away from it because they were drunk, I was almost in shock. I guess the alcohol loosens up your body/muscles or slows your reaction time and you sort of bend with the accident rather than stiffen up for impact and do more damage to yourself.
Of course-- there would be plenty less accidents all together without drunk drivers on the roads. And there are PLENTY of drunk driving accidents in which the driver and passengers are all instantly killed-- hopefully not taking innocent sober drivers with them.
I don't really know where I'm going with this post-- because there are too many variables to this theory and I don't have any statistics, but I just thought I'd share my personal observations.
Drunks at the wheel that hit things have a chance of living and sober people in that same accident could die or get seriously injured. I've seen it quite a few times and it still amazes me.
The stuff you mention is all anecdotal. I am not a chemist (but I am a homebrewer), and here's what I understand to be the difference between various alcoholic beverages. In the form that humans consume, there are basically two types of alcohol: ethyl and methyl. Yeast produce both, with ethyl alcohol in the greater quantity. Both forms of alchol are 'poisonous', but of the two ethyl is definitely preferable. Methyl breaks down to formaldehyde in your liver, which, among many nasty things, will cause you to go blind. In normal fermented beverages-- i.e., ones that have not been subject to distillation-- the quantity of methyl alcohol is a non-issue. Distilled beverages need to have the additional step of removing the methyl alcohol (or by engineering the distillation process so that methyl alcohol is not captured).
There are basically two types of yeast (a fungus) that are responsible for all alcohol that we drink: ale yeasts (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), and lager yeasts (Saccharomyces pastorianus). Ale yeasts ferment at a higher temperature range than do lager yeasts. Lager yeasts are also capable of breaking down dextrose, which is a type of sugar that contributes 'mouthfeel' (like 'fullness') to a beverage. This is why lagers tend to be lighter in body than ales. Various strains exists among these two types that produce a variety of esters, fusel alcohols, sulphur compounds, and so on, but in general these byproducts are kept to a minimum as they produce a whole variety of 'off flavors'-- fusels in particular make something taste 'hot' or 'spicy'.
Anyhow-- the point being that the real difference between your choices for alcoholic beverages are: 1) alcoholic content (by weight/volume) and 2) the other kinds of things that are mixed in with those alcohols, (eg., sugars, tannins, and so on). A strong drink (like wine as compared to a typical beer) affects you differently because there's more alcohol. Tannins also tend to make that hangover last a bit longer, although it should be said that hangovers are mostly caused by dehydration and/or vitamin B deficiency (vitamin B is utilized in alcohol metabolization).
Yeast, by itself, has little or nothing to do with those other compounds. They're just there because they existed in the yeast's food (like grapes, barley, rice, etc), and the yeast had nothing to do with them, so they stuck around. Other organisms (molds, bacteria, and other 'wild yeasts') may affect them somewhat, but modern breweries (Belgians excepted) go to great lengths to make sure that these contaminants do not enter the product, as they make quality control extremely difficult.
No, the point of these studies really is to try and isolate the benefits of consuming alcohol-- ethyl alcohol. Not the other things. We already know that, e.g., grapes are good for you, and if you really want a good source of antioxidants, try eating fresh fruits and veggies.
Now drinking 4 beers a day makes me health conscious and not an alcoholic!!