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3 Drinks a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Nzimmer911 writes "Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers according to a 20 years study following 1,824 people. From the article: 'But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that - for reasons that aren't entirely clear - abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.'"
Let's have them in lockup to cut down on doctors costs there.
I would say that people who don't drink are also worries. Did I close the door. Have I done all my homework. Are people going to like these shoes. How can I hide that I sleep around from my church. That sort of thing. People who drink may also spend less time worrying about the little details, and therefore have happier longer lives. Probably not, but maybe.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Except next week they will "discover" the opposite, and the following week alcohol will cause cancer, and the week after that it will help you lose weight, and next month they'll find that it causes Parkinson's, and then next spring it will be therapeutic for the same illness, and then...
No one has posted? Everyone must be out drinking...
Everybody's mortality rate is exactly the same: 100%
Really it's just a matter of when you die and how happy you are.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I imagine tightwad teetotalers live lives consumed with mental stress. If you're so uptight and judgmental that you can't even enjoy a single drink, that's got to have a lot of negative influences on your state of mind. I can see how that would translate from mental health to physical health, giving us the results we see here.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Nothing.
It is only a shock because the perception of Alcohol as an always harmful poison has been enhanced past reality by prohibitionist types.
It seems that a readily available solvent does some spring cleaning on the circulatory system with benefits that outweigh the over-hyped downsides of liver effects and social problems that do effect a subset of users.
I'd wager it has something to do with the relative stress levels of the people.
Alcohol is great for relaxing, and one might argue that people who are wine or beer drinkers tend to be more laid back across the board.
Alcohol can also kill off yucky bacteria that you might have in your throat or mouth.
It can also thin your blood a bit and decrease the risk of blood clots and various other things of that sort.
a) as usual, one of the favorite caveats of Slsahdot: correlation != causation
b) it would be interesting to see if choice of abstinence (not forced due to alcoholism or previous medical condition) is actually undertaken by people with higher level of general stress or those who are less social. As in, moderately consumed alcohol is basically being a "have reasonable fun" catalyst, which probably should increase life expectancy at least slightly.
"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." - Attributed to Ben Franklin and I'm too lazy to verify it.
I don't find this information at all surprising, but I'm happy enough to hear it. make mine a double too.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Alcohol kills off my weakest cells, leaving only the fittest.
We've know for a LONG time that teetotalers had higher rates of heart attacks than social drinkers. Abstention from alcohol is unnatural - even apes have been found to make home brew using fruits. And where do you think the "milk from contented cows" came from? That silage at the end of the winter stinks of alcohol, it's been partially fermenting for months.
They never define what a heavy drinker is. If there are negative effects associated with excessive drinking and positive effects with "heavy" drinking then it's just semantics. "Heavy drinking" is now that proper amount and excessive drinking will be called heavy drinking. Just assign a quantitative value so everyone has an unambiguous definition.
This must be why the average lifespan of Muslims is so low. BrB; researching Mormon lifespans...
like a herd of buffalo... booze comes in and kills the weakest link.
It's easy to avoid sports-related, travelling, or stress-related fatalities if you're passed out on the deck.
While the WC Fields wino-stereotype is quite common in fiction, its actually not very common in the real world. Most alcoholics tend to be thin, and to a lesser extend borderline malnourished. Their poison of choice is alcohol, it occupies most of their spare time. In contrast, most western nations now have major dietary problems -- most people are overweight due to lifestyle, choice of foods, and lack of exercise. Its not that alcoholics or heavy drinkers are more healthy, its that they're not as unhealthy as the median (of fatties and smokers).
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I think what confuses me more than the result is why this study hadn't already been performed already. It's such an obvious study that everyone would be interested about.
What gives?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
guess I am getting back on the wagon... or is it off the wagon. Where's my bottle opener...
This could be due to many other factors than just alcohol. What about the food? Who eats more additives? Maybe the alcoholics only eat fresh food, and the nondrinkers eat a lot of fastfoods with tons of food additives. And, as many have noted: stress. I personally believe that non drinkers live longer, as long as you have your mental health under control (stress). Cannabis smokers probably live the longest :)
Alcohol is still a poison for the human body and damages the liver, so it can't imagine that it would be healthy in the long run. The majority of non drinkers in this study must have been religious freaks with no spirituality what so ever... start doing qigong or whatever (have a joint).
From TFA:
heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk.
Oh really? Gee the way I see it, both groups are 100% likely to die. Now I would accept "less likely to die before age X", or "less likely to die from disease Y", but as it stands the above sentence is utter rubbish.
When will science reporters sit down and analyze what they write?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe because having a drink sort of releases the build of stress, and they say stress is the #1 killer,
but then again, I might just be looking for any excuse to drink!
Three drinks a day is moderate. If you regularly have a few drinks with friends after work, you're not drinking heavily. This is the same kind of nonsense as the claim that five or six drinks in two hours constitutes a binge. I don't know why the hell we let people who hate the idea of a good time dictate what's socially acceptable, to the point where anyone who doesn't conform is labeled an alcoholic and stuck in a treatment / proselytizing program.
I'll drink to that!!!
"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
whenever someone complained they couldn't go out drinking due to being sick, we used to say, "alcohol kills all germs!"
Looks like we were right.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
There goes my pension plan: looks like I can't drink myself to the point where I won't live long enough to need a pension...
...probably helps keep people happy, and happy people are usually less stressed out. Wine is good for the heart. Liquor helps kill germs and sterilize, right? Beer is good for any reason.
Now how to space it so I'm always happy....
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Disclaimer: I drink. Alot.
You cannot trust the numbers. People have (in the past), can (right now), and will continue to (in the future) rig the numbers for whatever interest is providing the funding. Non profit organizations aren't excluded, although the corporate entity may not be making money off of it someone within the organization stands to make a lot of money off of something like this. I remember in the past all of the studies showing that wine was good for your heart, and that drinking with a meal aided in digestion. This is bogus. The people that brought the study together regarding the wine were catering to special interest groups. And drinking "helps" digestion in a negative way. Alcohol irritates membrane in the lining of your intestines, this irritation does produce more fluids to aid in breaking down the food but it comes at a massive disadvantage. It is akin to saying "I have a cure that instantly remedies athlete's foot. It is sawing your foot off with a hacksaw."
I don't think I've ever seen a study on the long term effects of Alcohol that didn't reach the same conclusion as this study. It's paradoxical since the short term effects can be fatal, and as the article says it's known to cause specific diseases (like cancer). You should read up on it (or at least read the fucking article).
...tend to increase one's risk of dying...
Isn't my risk of dying, uh, pretty close to 1, regardless of other factors?
What doesn't alcohol help you with? Better brain, longer life, more fun, less stress ;)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/05/01/20/1459230/Alcohol-is-Good-for-Your-Brain
http://science.slashdot.org/story/06/12/20/1913227/Drinking-Alcohol-May-Extend-Your-Life
Anyway, decades ago my grandmother's doctor already told her to occasionally drink a glass of wine or sparkling wine because it's good for your circulatory system or something like that.
Alcohol increases your HDL cholesterol levels. This alone could explain the mortality rates.
one per person.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
What a ridiculous study and article. It's a pretty narrow sample population (only 1,824 people who had outpatient care), and it has a huge age range without taking into account any other age ranges. They can't take such a narrow sample, especially one with such a strange and not-so-common denominator (outpatient care), and apply it to the population in general to make conclusions that fly in the face of other studies that use real stratified sampling. Also, what's with the unfounded statements the writer makes? "One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don't drink actually tend to die sooner than those who do." Consistent finding? Where are his citations? He doesn't have them... Time just wants hits on their website because it increases their revenue, so they write a biased article about a poorly-devised study, and what do you know? It works. It's pretty sad. They should stick with their "Top 10" and "Top 100" lists they put out all the time. At least then they're inherently based on opinions and not trying to mask them with nonsense they call science.... just my two cents.
The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.
What's missing is information on the uncertainty. The difference between 60% and 69% mortality isn't that much in a study this small. If you divide up the participants equally into three categories, I can easily see the two values being not statistically significantly different. (It's harder to imagine the 41% isn't significantly lower, though.)
These studies are not new, and doctors have known about the 'J' shaped curve for a while - where abstaining is correlated with high all-cause mortality than moderate alcohol intake, but heavy intake is associated with increased mortality too. However, these studies have only shown a correlation, not a causation, and until we have a randomised control trial (which is unlikely ever to happen) this is unlikely to be proven clearly. There is some suggestion that the correlation may be to do with a confounding factor - which is social drinking. Those drinking 3/day every other day, likely have a good social environment, which is independently linked to improved health. On the other hand, the cardiologist at our local hospital believes it is a true effect of alcohol and prescribes two glasses of wine to all patients admitted with a myocardial infarction/heart attack.
But, as we learned yesterday, sitting down kills, so I guess there are some stand-up drinkers bumping up the average somewhere.
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This country is so very freaked about mind-altering substances, vices, and "sins", that it doesn't get talked about much. But the truth is it's been known for over a century that drinkers have cleaner arteries. Thinner blood, and/or some chemistry with the alcohol seems to help keep the plaques from forming.
Very heavy and binge drinking does start to cause other problems - and these results are what people bandy about in order to bash alcohol as a deadly vice. But it's been clear for a long time that moderate drinking can avoid those problems while still resulting in cleaner arteries. And since heart disease is the single biggest killer in the first world, it should be no surprise at all that anything which can reduce atherosclerosis results in a noticeable decrease in the death rate.
Nothing about this study is news to anyone who's paid attention to the science, anytime in the last hundred years.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Well, this has been studied before. This isn't anything new. Alcohol in moderation has been proven to reduce lots of types of disease and medical problems in those who only drink a little. The studies form a J-Curve where those who don't drink in a population have a certain number of (Strokes, heart attacks, etc). Those in the population who drink 1-2 drinks a day show a significant lowering of those symptoms. However, those who drink more than 3 drinks per day have a DRASTIC increase as they have more health problems like Cirrhosis of liver and other alcohol related problems.
Here's an article from 2004 about the effects of alcohol and strokes and has an image of the J-Curve graph.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
At my medical school, I've heard professors say on several occasions that drinking a single measure of alcohol (defined as either 1 dl of wine, 2,5 dl of beer or 0,3 dl of spirit) a day is beneficial to your health, though nobody can say why that is. It's usually mentioned in the context of the French paradox. Of course, they never forget to mention to be careful about spreading that bit of information around - you never know when you might be talking to an alcoholic in recovery. Certainly puts the habits of Mad Men characters in a new perspective.
I am surprised, though, at the article claiming that alcohol abstination is more common in lower socioeconomic classes. I was always under the impression that lower standard of living leads to higher prevalence of alcoholism and that higher income usually correlates with better higher health consciousness.
I imagine this is due to alcohol being considered a poison by the body, thus making the body work to kick out toxic substance. Keep your body in shape by giving it a lot of practice fighting off things probably keeps you stronger.
Does anybody know anything about anything?
I'm reminded of the Woody Allen film "Sleepers".
Well, I googled and found that previous 2004 study, but now, just seconds later when I click on it, it's behind a paywall of some sort. Here's another link from 2007 showing the same graph
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
After hearing about this, the Daleks have instituted a strict regimen of daily alcohol intake to ward of The Oncoming Storm...
Bow-ties are cool.
Yes!
And more time to drink!
Maybe. But alcohol is also known to reduce blood glucose levels.
I can talk about my circle of friends/fellow students in college. Alcohol is used to relieve stress.. much like a cigarette. Alcohol leads to sex for most teenagers/mid-20s men and women (and I suppose older, but this commentary is from my own experience), a healthy activity -- that also relives stress. Alcohol is social. A more social person is shown to also have a healthier life versus a non-social person. Alcohol is a huge part of teenage/mid-20s life in New Jersey, especially enrolled at a university -- and I imagine most American life.
Are there better options for a healthy lifestyle? Exercise, diet, etc? Absolutely. But when you look at all things evenly at the end of the day, it does not surprise me that alcohol is a positive part of life for most people.
I think it is worthwhile considering why people abstain from drinking. Long-term abstention is typically not motivated solely, or even in part, by some moral compass but rather by contraindications. Given the number of potential drug interactions, symptom-exacerbating effects and bodily stresses, stresses which people with life-shortening conditions typically cannot handle well, alcohol is probably not removed from otherwise healthy individuals. This is no different from the observation that people that buy treadmills are fatter than the average. Do treadmills make people fat?
Did they filter out people who don't drink at all because the have a chronic, life-shortening disease that is only made worse because of alcohol consumption? Sure hope they did, because if they didn't, it sure would make for a skewed result...
Did they factor in how many of the non-drinkers were killed by drunk people?
you can get the same pharmacological effect with a daily aspirin
without all the unwanted mental effects of alcohol
yes, some people want those mental effects, but one thing i've found out in my life is that drugs degrade life, they don't enhance it
people who chronically abuse drugs, any drug, including alcohol, and think that it enhances life are actually in some sort of pyschic pain, and the drugs blot out and remove that pain. in this way their lvies are "enhanced"
they are temporarily relieving that pain, but they'd be far better off coping with the pain, to get at its source, and nipping the problem in the bud. rather than carrying around a monkey on their backs their entire lives
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Where are mod points when you want them?
The only people who will be surprised by this study are the puritans on in the religious right. Unfortunately, they won't just be surprised, they will be offended and insist that this must be wrong, because drink is the devil's tool.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
People drink because it's good and the effects are relaxing.
Some need more relaxing than others because they have shit lifes (shit wives, shit parents, shit work, history of abuse, chronic pain, light mentality disorders).
Then, heavyer drinking (aka getting shitfaced) alleviates the daily stress they face. Stress is bad for the hearth and the rest of the body.
30 years of high, sustained stress can wreak havoc on a human being, while moderate alcohol abuse will lighten stress by drowning the dailies unpleasantnesses
and numb short term memory while only killing your liver.
Better your liver than your heart...
It's because the heavy drinkers' muscles are nice and relaxed when they plow into the sober folks' cars.
From TFA:
So the delta between moderate and heavy (i.e. "three drinks a day") is a full 19 percentage points, meaning almost 50 percent more heavy drinkers than moderate drinkers were dead by the end of the test. Yes, there could be various other factors exaggerating the impact, i.e. sick people drinking away the pain, but the researchers were very clear about the overall outcome:
Moderate drinkers lived the longest, and heavy drinkers did well relative to abstainers. But let's not forget how many of them were dead at the end of the study. If you want to keep the doctor away, exercise and eating well, and apparently some moderate alcohol intake, is the best past, not three drinks a day. Just in case anyone is making health decisions based on Slashdot headlines (in which case, God help you :)
Maybe they just pass out and sleep more.
I wonder what the numbers would be like if they factored in deaths caused in accidents and fights by heavy drinkers, moderate drinkers and teetotalers. Consider the person's own life expectancy and the subtract the average number of years they'll cut short other peoples' lives.
I have no problem with other people drinking (as long as they aren't driving under the influence) but I've never even tried an alcoholic beverage myself for exactly that reason. I don't care what it does for my own life expectancy, I'm much more concerned I'd do something incredibly stupid under the influence and ruin my life. If you can handle your alcohol and behave responsibly even when drinking, more power to you. I, however, am not going to gamble over how I'll behave when my judgment is impaired.
But you are correct in that way too many involved with the recovery movement seems to act like 3 drinks is 'heavy' if not 'problem' drinking. For me it is not. YMMV.
if you're allowed 3 drinks per day and it is good for you why not save up your booze allowance and have 3 six packs on Friday night? Makes perfect sense!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Perhaps it hasn't been well studied before, but it has been widely known in the medical industry for a long, long time that alcohol consumption has health benifits.
Many many years ago I read an article on heart disease (I believe in National Geographic) that mentioned as an aside that alcohol is known to clear artiries of the kinds of buildups that cause heart attacks. They said that coroners can immediately tell they are autopsying alcholoics because of two things: their greatly enlarged hearts (from trying to pump around all that thinned-out blood, probably a bad thing), and their artieres are all as clean as a whistle. They went on to say that they don't like to publicise this, due worries that it might encourage alcoholisim.
I noticed many years later that medical professionals seemed to settle for advising "moderate consumption" of alcohol (probably on the theory that nobody can mistake that for encouraging alcoholisim). The truth, buried in that article long ago, is that alcohol is good for you as long as you can avoid overdoing it to the extent that an alcoholic would. The problem is that some people are just predisposed to alcoholisim, and for that smaller group starting drinking is a very Bad Thing.
Not only am I going to live, but I have a 1% better chance of living longer than those idiots who don't drink!
Now I'm waiting for the study that tells me playing World of Warcraft for 8 hours a day is beneficial to my longevity as well! :)
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Blame lazy reporters!
Do you really believe the writer of this pseudo-science article had to rush to meet an important reporting deadline so they wouldn't get scooped by another network?!?
Quantum Physics a.k.a. sub-molecular statistics
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. ~Winston Churchill
correlation != causation
Just take everything with a pinch of salt, don't be misled, and then these studies might be more useful to you.
Grand Theft Wiki
There is a big, big difference between "3 drinks / day" and "regularly have a few drinks with friends after work", unless you work 7 days / week and can't drive home each day.
There is also a big difference between having 6 drinks out during an occasional night on the town a few times a month, and having 6-7 drinks every evening of every weekend or holiday. One is healthy normal behavior, and one is not. If you can't get through your weekend without going on a bender, you have issues.
The difference between an alcoholic and one who is not is not if they drink daily, it is if they can NOT drink daily, and not have an issue with it.
My guess is most (where "most" == more than half) of the non-drinkers in the study are former drinkers that drank so much they became teetotalers to save their marriages/jobs/lives/etc. At that point, though, your body is already screwed. Sure, you might buy yourself another decade or two, but the damage is done (as evidenced with the higher mortality rate).
Fixed that for you.
The joke is obviously referring to hangovers (where you feel particularly shitty in the morning after drinking), which marijuana does not give you.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
muwahaha
ahem
when the science in favor of it began to get overwhelming i started drinking again after having stopped after college. several years ago i began posting stories here http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/showthread.php?t=23462 because it simply was a tide too large to ignore.
i don't particularly like drinking, and getting those daily drinks down after years of passing them up proved a lot more difficult than i had initially thought.
it's been about 10 years since i started and while it's easier to drink than it was and i often find myself looking forward to it, it still requires some effort.
i hope it's worth it
the joke will really be on me if these studies turn out to be wrong.
- js.
"...conclusion based on horribly imperfect information and call it science!"
My gods man, do you realize how difficult it would be to access/store/process/interpret all the information involved with the interactions of the elements and chemicals consumed and absorbed in the body? THAT seriously would have to be Star Trek 24(?) century level technology. However, you want to bury any 'science' done with the very imperfect amount of imformation we as humans have now and let it go. I say no. And that is not my belief. I know it. You know it. Them over there, they know that we don't know everything. And I say good. Onward. Freakin learn. Teach yourself. Grow old and receive medical care that has evolved from this 'imperfect science'.
I will follow some people, and draw conclusions based on horribly imperfect information and call it science!
On a similar note, heavy beer drinkers have a much lower rate of prostate cancer. The beer doesnt really do anything, its the massive amounts of urination that take place... But still ... ^___^
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
Alcohol is too deeply ingrained into our culture to separate it from all the confounding factors. Non-drinkers might be very poor, non-sociable, not have time to drink due to a stressful job, drive a lot, or participate in different risky activities. So I generally take such findings with a grain of salt.
OTOH, alcohol is the reason our ancestors gave up the 15 hour work week (hunter-gatherers) for the 100 hour work week (farming) 10,000 years ago. Seriously, you can't generate significant quantities of alcohol without agriculture, so that's a leading theory as to why humans would bother with the harder lifestyle with reduced lifespan. In the time since, our metabolism has probably adapted to ethanol consumption. This is especially apparent since other alcohols generally give us problems (methanol causes blindness, isopropanol is a CNS depressant, ethylene glycol causes an anion gap acidosis), and are potentially fatal once you drink half a liter or so. Ethanol can be chronically drunk by the gallon (BTW, you know someone has a problem if that's their unit of measurement).
There's huge individual variation though. Some women will develop alcoholic liver disease (3 month mortality of up to 75%) with as little as 1.3 beers/day. That's why many physicians refuse to recommend alcohol to patients who don't drink despite the studies. The people with exceptionally low tolerance are too rare to really affect the statistics, but common enough that most physicians would wind up killing someone with a recommendation of "moderate" alcohol consumption. Plus the fact that you never want people to overshoot and become alcoholics.
So, if I understood this correct, one should stand up while drinking. Cause it's bad to sit down!
That will hopefully do something about all of those that drink and drive!
I think it was Dean Martin who said it best:
"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."
Actually, it was Frank Sinatra.
Us musicians know how to live long and happy. Look at Keith Richards...
"I feel bad for people who don't smoke marijuana. When they wake up in the morning, that's as hungry as they're going to feel all day". Now its fixed.
"There's a lot of doctors who tell me, I better start slowing it down.
But there's more old drunks than there are old doctors so I guess we'd better have another round."
As usual, ask yourself what Willie would do.
Abstainers may include teetotalers who used to abuse. Those people may have sustained damage from other drugs such as nicotine. Abstainers may also include people with bad health.
Summary irresponsibly projects too much from the study.
I wonder if those who can easily afford to have 3 drinks a day (but who don't over-imbibe) largely fall into the same demographic of those who can also afford decent medical treatment (in places where there isn't decent universal health care).
The studies aren't trash, generally. In fact, it's most likely that they're all true at the same time, except that you only got a 30-word summary typed up by a journalist who only skimmed the abstract. It's entirely possible for a food to be both good and bad for you in completely independent ways. A study that found that the amount of fat in eggs is unhealthy does not contradict a study that says the good cholesterol in eggs is helpful. Neither one of those studies really tells you whether eggs are good for you or bad for you overall, or in what quantity. Unfortunately, the media reports every single one of these very specific findings as if they were the complete story, resulting in the alternating "good for you"/"bad for you" articles you're whining about.
If you're referring to prohibition in the US, doctors wrote prescriptions for one pint of whiskey not beer. The prescriptions could be filled at drugstores. ISTR that one of our national drugstore chains in the US got its start in the prohibition era as an outlet for prescription whisky, but I could have that wrong.
======
As for three drinks a day keeps the doctor away, I'd like to suggest the possibility that keeping doctors and other medical professionals at a substantial distance might have more positive effect on longevity than how much ethanol one consumes.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Here's the explanation. Life is basically our bodies combatting bacteria at all times that are trying to eat us. Our immune systems kill this bacteria when it detects this. Alcohol kills bacteria. In moderate amounts alcohol kills enough bacteria to prolong life. However, if used too much like anything else it will not only kill bacteria, but actual body tissue. Therefore enough alcohol, enough measured to only kill bacteria in your body will definitely prolong life. Pretty simple actually. Slow down the bacteria that are trying to eat you, and you live longer.
As the article says the study followed only 1,824 people. If that range were much wider I don't think the results would be the same .
From the TIME article:
The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years.
Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.
I find the comment about the age ranges to be an interesting bias. The mortality rate seems to imply that the ONLY individuals studied were between 55 and 65. Over a twenty year period the youngest people in the study would be 75 and the oldest would be 85. That would be a reasonable explanation for the 41% to 69% mortality rates. Is there a breakdown that shows deaths by age?
If the age bias exists, it would be ignoring deaths, accidents and health problems caused by alcohol abuse in earlier years. Those people who make it to the 55 to 65 age range of the study would have been the people who most likely didn't abuse alcohol and can reap the medicinal benefits of artery cleaning and other factors.
You also need to factor in the aspect of out-patient care. That might select for those people who have decent medical care and ignore those on the fringe die early due to alcohol related problems.
It would be nice to see a peer review of the study.
I found the link that has the actual study. The ONLY people studied were between 55 and 65.
Ah, and for the record, lifetime abstainers were not considered as part of the data base.
Finally some good news!! I seriously read this article just as I was finishing my 2nd 16-oz can of Mike's Harder Lemonade. I was just thinking (not 20 minutes ago), "Am I killing myself by doing this every day??". Had no idea I was actually adding years onto my life! :) :)
There are troy ounces too.
Short answer 1 UK gallon = 10 pounds of water. And a fluid ounce is 1/160th of a UK gallon. (US gallon and ounces are slightly different). Does that make more sense?
There are 8 furlongs to a mile, 10 chains to a furlong, and 100 links to a chain. But in modern times we think of a mile as being 5280 feet(1760 yards), which is why this system seems so bizarre and arbitrary. If we stuck to furlongs and chains maybe it would be less bizarre. An acre is 1 furlong by 1 chain. (1/640th of a square mile)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The actual research study has even more facts to consider, like the fact that life long abstainers were excluded from the study and that a significant number of the 'abstainers' had drinking problems as well as health problems. There is also a 'light' drinker category that is in the research study but not the TIME article.
It is interesting how those facts never make it into the mainstream articles.
...or Sammy Davis Jr.
How does that explain the Mormons? Is caffeine the culprit?
It seems mortality rate should be equal for abstainers and drinkers alike, falling around 100%.
Woohoo! Great confirmation.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
The study says they cannot factor for the fact that drinking is expensive so the lower classes drink less and they can die first because of the lower quality of life.
Well, do it in southern Europe; Portugal, Spain, Italy and to a certain degree France all have very good wines for a very low price. For comparison, I can tell you that a € 3 Euro bottle in here is already a quite good red wine. And besides, since people have free universal healthcare, the income factor doesn't count anyway. So they could be certain if what they are saying is true or not. Although of course, even the doctors here recomend taking 2 glasses of red wine a day, so I believe they already know it actually helps your health.
I'm a body builder so I hate alcohol (inhibits muscle growth). A nice toke of some green every day keeps me stress free and happy :)
And it's not bad for my body at all.
"I feel bad for people who don't smoke marijuana. When they wake up in the afternoon, that's as good as they're going to feel all day".
There, fixed that for ya.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I recently heard about pot's long term effects on the reticular activating system, especially in adolecents, and I'm kind of worried. THe data seems to say I could go on stims when the problem (ADHD/narcolepsy-esque), though that's just my own conjuction, can anybody comment on this issue? I know it's kinda OT, but I'm really worried. Peace.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
I think it would be just good manners from the /. editors that if one can't get to the source of some piece of information then it should not be the subject of an /. post. The original article is behind a paywall, so anything seriously trying to interpret these findindings is left none the wiser.
This subject is clearly interesting and controversial, and it would me immensily useful to go to the source to do some customary checks (who is sponsoring the study? what are the actual concolussions? was this peer reviewed? Where? By whom? )
As it is the only thing we have is a 2nd hand account that as usual does not even try to ask the important questions regarding the procedures of investigation and the validity of the results.
ON these circumstance no informed debate is possible.