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?
FTA: However, "things radically change" when consumption goes beyond these levels
For starters, you wake up in bed with a stranger not knowing how either got there...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I still find it interesting that at 18 you're allowed join the military and die but you're not allowed to drink alcohol.
Is that four drinks every day? Or is that up to four drinks in a given 24-hour period, from time to time? - i.e. four drinks on Saturday night, then several more scattered throughout the week
Because I don't hink I'd consider four drinks every day to be "moderate" drinking.
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."
The things I do for my health ... *hic*
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Good moods will help prevent a cold and alcohol will extend my lifespan. Good thing alcohol puts me in a good mood.
Mark
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.
Or, is it that the behavior of enjoying a drink or two a day is correlated with something else that extends longevity (e.g., having more friends, being more relaxed and less stressed, etc.).
Check out the worldwide recommendations for drinking. Currenty (as far as this chart is concerned), the # of drinks men should consume is "no more than two drinks per day", and "no more than one drink per day" for women.
http://www.drinkingandyou.com/site/uk/biggy.htm
I gotta have more cowbell.
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."
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.
In the Philippines, bartenders [do not] check the age of American soldiers.
Fair enough. In the Philippines, American soldiers do not check the age of Philippino girls...
Where I live, people still make their own moonshine in their basement. My manager told me that when she starts feeling a cold coming on, she'll take a shot or two of that nasty stuff at night and then wake up feeling great. But I guess when you're drinking stuff that is used for sterilization it's not surprising. :) However, I'm curious as to whether or not the "healing effects" are lessened if you don't manage to drink every day, sort of like when you stop taking antibiotics prematurely. Chock one up to good old fashioned redneck ingenuity. :P
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
Homer: "To alcohol, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems"
Monstar L
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.
Once lived in a dorm that was co-ed by door, and was awakened one night by a drunken female staggering in my door and flopping down next to me in bed...She'd gotten off on the wrong floor from the elevator, and had mistaken my room for her room. I don't know who the hell she thought I was...Anyway...Being a chivalrous geek, I just rolled over and went back to sleep...I assumed that she would understand the nature of her mistake upon awakening, and maybe, I don't know, invite me to breakfast or something.
Three hours later I was standing in the hall with no shirt, after being thrown out of my own room by a still-drunk girl who was convinced that I'd sneaked into her room in the night! One of my floormates called campus security (probably for their own amusement), and the whole thing ended up being written up (in garbled form) as a security report in the campus paper.
Not only did I not get breakfast, poor girl was so humiliated by the whole incident that she avoided me until I transferred 18 months later.
I think the moral is either: Don't drink the punch, or Let sleeping geeks lie.
Wow buddy, you sound streesed. How about a drink?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
It is amazing(troubling) the number of studies that leave out the reason for not drinking. To read the article and not see any mention of controls on reason for abstaining raises BIG question marks in my mind.
This would not just apply to alcohol. If there was a study on Caffine, I would want the abstainers not to have chosen to refrain. Why? if the caffine leaves them feeling bad enough to quit they are already tangebly different than the average person.
The one thing that these types of articles always seem to do is to lump all types of alcohol together although there are several different types of alcohol sources. I'm not a connoisseur by any stretch, but I've heard from people who are in the medical profession that the body reacts very differently to different types of alcohol and that different types have different health benefits.
;)
As I understand it, and I have full confidence in the Slashdot crowd to let me know if I'm wrong, red wine alcohol comes from the sugar fermentation of red grapes and contains quite a bit of healthy anti-oxidants. White wine, on the other hand, contains far fewer anti-oxidants and therefore does not have the health benefits of red wine. In fact, the anti-oxidants entry on Wikipedia also makes this claim. Conversely, the alcohol in harder drinks like whiskey is grain-based alcohol that generally has little health benefits, not including its ability to wipe out the weaker brain cells.
Friends of mine who are very much into drinking and partying have said from their own experience that the alcohol buzz from sources like grapes is vastly different and impacts them differently than the grain alcohol in harder drinks. (Yes, I'm aware that the smart-ass responses to that almost write themselves.)
But even a friend's mom who is a registered nurse got on his case one time when he got plastered from a combination of wine and spirits, claiming that, "Mixing those types of alcohol together is incredibly dangerous!"
Again, as one not involved in the medical profession I can only make suppositions on all of this. But it does bother me how reports like this have a tendency of throwing around the generic term "alcohol" as though it encompasses all drinks when that should not necessarily be the case.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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.
We college students have known about this for years!
This sig is false.
Truth is that people's lives are a combination of so many factors that singling out one factor is pretty pointless.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
They're probably too hung over.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
>Please don't kill Douglas Adams for me, and others.
Too late.
*ducks*
The ACLU takes an active position against the individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.
http://www.aclu.org/police/gen/14523res20020304.ht ml
They claim to be neutral, but their officially stated position is not:
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.
...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......
Here in the US we have this thing called the drug war. You may have heard of it. One of the central tenants pushed out by the government propaganda machine (called the ONDCP) is that all use is abuse. There's no such thing as "harmless use" of any drug, not in the brave new USA at least.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You first, I'm having a beer.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.