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.'"

Comments

Stress?

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Stress?

[insertwackynamehere]

Maybe one day if you try drinking you will find that unless you reach a serious blackout level of alcohol (something you can avoid if you are smart and not an alcoholic), most of the "loss of control" is really just a combination of lowered inhibitions and the social acceptance of having lowered inhibitions when you and the people around you are also drinking. I honestly think the lowered inhibitions, while definitely present from alcohol alone, is compounded by the fact that its a convenient little excuse where it's like "we're all drinking we can all have fun and do things we wouldn't otherwise do". Society sees alcohol as a social lubricant so it only makes it more of one.

I used to not drink either. I didn't drink freshman year of college and the beginning of sophomore year. To each their own. But it really doesn't have to be scary or ridiculous. You don't lose control unless you have a problem, have no experience (and dont try to gain it before diving in) or want to. Furthrmore, most people who say "I am so drunk" are probably just enjoying the fact that everyone else is saying the same thing and everyone feels much more at ease because of the social bonding aspect of the whole thing.

Re:Eh

[iamhigh]

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!

Three drinks a day is "heavy"?

[sco08y]

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.

Re:Three drinks a day is "heavy"?

[jpmorgan]

Everybody likes to think of themselves as normal.

The US department of health defines 'moderate' drinking as 1 drink per day, and heavy drinking as anything above 2 drinks per day. http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm#moderateDrinking

According to a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, only about 10% of Americans have more than 2 drinks per day. By comparison, over 35% of Americans consider themselves abstainers. More than half the population has at most one drink, if they drink at all. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/153/1/64

Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your level of alcohol consumption, this study suggests you're probably healthier than those 35% abstainers. But stop fooling yourself: you're consuming several times the normal amount of alcohol and by any reasonable definition, you are a heavy drinker.

Re:To be perfectly clear ...

[blueg3]

That's mortality probability. A mortality rate (like many rates) is per unit time.

Re:Chill out factor

[clone53421]

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.

Re:Eh

[Fulcrum of Evil]

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.

Re:Eh

[Alef]

Disclaimer: I haven't read the study (it is apparently not accessible from Sweden through the link).

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.

Re:Eh

[Mister Whirly]

Everything is best in moderation - including moderation.

Re:Old News

[chrisG23]

Please look at the summary again. The significant part is not that it found that people who drink in moderation live longer than people who abstain, (which is the type of result that you are linking to) it found that PEOPLE WHO ABSTAIN DO NOT LIVE AS LONG AS PEOPLE THAT DRINK HEAVILY. Sorry for the yelling, but I think many people might quickly skim over the summary and assume its the same sort of thing that has already been reported on, moderate drinking has health benefits vs. abstention. This is something else, in this study of some 2,000 people, the results showed that in order of decreasing lifespan it went like this:

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.