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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 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...
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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"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.
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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?
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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.
Woah, you should submit your findings to Nature.
No, I don't want to be premature here, but I think I smell a Nobel in Medicine.
"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.........
That's mortality probability. A mortality rate (like many rates) is per unit time.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
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.
Not caffeine specifically, just coffee and tea. Lots of soda drinkers around here.
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.
The joke is obviously referring to hangovers (where you feel particularly shitty in the morning after drinking), which marijuana does not give you.
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