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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.'"
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.
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like a herd of buffalo... booze comes in and kills the weakest link.
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?
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Eggs.
Was good for you. Then bad for you. Now has good cholestorol. It's the prime example of why "studies" are nothing but trash. Follow some people, draw a conclusion based on horribly imperfect information and call it science!
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
What about people who abstained from drinking alcohol because they were sick?
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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.
That's mortality probability. A mortality rate (like many rates) is per unit time.
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.
This is only in Utah: http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol10/3/ but it found better life expectancy among LDS (mormon) people, so there are definitely studies that show opposite results.
It was more like 23 or 24 years in my case, and since then I’ve noticed that drinking made good times better and bad times worse. YMMV.
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Was good for you. Then bad for you. Now has good cholestorol.
That's what happens when you listen to some sensationalist muckraker. Fact is, studies will disagree or find different things, and media looking for a thrill will oversimplify in to the crap you just repeated. It's not the scientists' fault, though - blame the 24 hour news cycle.
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This study measures a fact (death certificates vs reported drink rates).
A fact is not something that you measure. You can collect statistical data, and you can try to infer a conclusion from the data. There are all sorts of ways to make the wrong conclusion though, depending on how the data was collected, if it involved subjectivity somewhere, if there are some underlying mechanisms you are not modelling, whether you are incorrectly assuming that correlation implies causation etc. etc. (see for instance Wikipedia.)
The study might measure a number of death certificates (where? when?) and reported drinking rates (reported how?) as you say, but whether that means that "Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers" (if that is even what they study says, I'm quoting the Time article) is a rather far-reaching conclusion someone has made, possibly incorrectly. Maybe they forgot to compensate for some important factor; Perhaps people with predisposition for some deceases (are told to) avoid alcohol? Perhaps those who avoid alcohol have some personality trait that make them more stressed, working longer hours, or sleeping less, which in turn could be detrimental to life expectancy? And if there in fact is a positive connection between drinking and life expectancy, does it apply to everyone or just a small part of the population? Maybe alcohol works as a light medication for depression, helping some but harming most?
Facts can vary with each collections but don't tend to reverse.
Scientific conclusions change all the time.
Everything is best in moderation - including moderation.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Unfortunately, it goes well beyond just the media "this will kill you" of the day. In the case of fats, it has permeated medicine, prescription drugs, and nutritional advice of all sorts. It's now a multi-billion dollar industry. There is evidence to support that the mass jump onto the bandwagon is at least in part to blame for the rise of obesity and diabetes.
In the case of alcohol, studies have rather consistently found that moderate drinkers have the lowest mortality rate. TFA does not disagree. It just enlarges that, in fact, heavy drinkers do better than non-drinkers but not as well as moderate drinkers.
Moderate drinkers > Heavy drinkers > Abstainers
So now the discussion here can be was the study flawed in some way or is this true and alcohol has some effect, physically, psychologically (because how one feels does have an effect on health) or both on humans that is beneficial to living a long life.