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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.'"
That's not the opposite.
This study measures a fact (death certificates vs reported drink rates).
Facts can vary with each collections but don't tend to reverse.
You can discover a problem with your collection methods but these researchers have other papers and have been doing this a while so it's unlikely (google their names).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The article says that they define heavy drinking as more than three drinks a day.
Does that help?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_ratio
This is what they're talking about. Don't blame the reporters; if they said "non-drinkers have a hazard ratio of 1.6 ± 0.2 (p 0.05) relative to heavy drinkers" most people would say "Whaaa ...?"
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
They also abstain from tobacco and caffeine. It’s not like alcohol is the only factor here...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
There's nothing I can disagree with in your post. All those are reasonable and plausible points.
However, the study was done by experienced researchers (who have other papers on alcohol, depression vs alcohol, and alcoholism) and controlled for most of the things you raised (including people being told to avoid alcohol).
No data collection will ever come out the same (I learned that back in college lab. Everyone got similar but different data in the same damn room with very simple things to measure).
The study could be wrong, but it fits with prior moderate drinking data. One of the problems of our puritan heritage is that this kind of data (especially for pot and Nixon) has been suppressed in the past. And another problem is when the people collecting the data have an agenda.
Looking over the other papers by two of the authors, it seemed to me they are the classic dry scientist types and lack an agenda.
I'm not a teetotaler, moderate drinker or heavy drinker. I'm a sub moderate drinker (1/10th to 1/2 a drink a day) who has a couple heavy drinking vacations a year.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Not caffeine specifically, just coffee and tea. Lots of soda drinkers around here.
bit of bored googleing
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
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.
You could if you started one study a year for 20 years
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
The way he is twisting the joke is removing the punchline. In Frank Sinatra's version the joke teller proclaims how he feels bad for people who don't drink, then explains it is because they don't have hangovers. Normally not having a hangover is considered to be a good thing, so this is a comedic reversal.
In the GGPs version, there is no reversal. He feels bad for people who don't get high, because they don't get high. The equivalent (and equally unfunny) form of this joke for drinking would be if Frank Sinatra felt bad for people who didn't drink because when they woke up they were not going to get drunk later that day. Again no comedic reversal, just an unfunny statement of the obvious.
This is why I explained that the joke was referring to hangovers, not the actual intended effects of the substance. You could perhaps argue that the new joke is also funny, but it is a new joke. Its form has been fundamentally changed.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)