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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.'"
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.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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?"
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 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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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