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

Eh

[mark72005]

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...

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

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:Eh

[Mister Whirly]

Everything is best in moderation - including moderation.

Re:Eh

[insertwackynamehere]

moderate parent up

but not too much!

Well yea...

[Last_Available_Usern]

It's easy to avoid sports-related, travelling, or stress-related fatalities if you're passed out on the deck.

Re:Stress?

[Sinistar2k]

Honestly, the only time I feel stress about being a tightwad teetotaler is when people offer to buy me a drink or try to hand me a beer and then express shock that I'm alcohol averse.

But then, I masturbate a lot, so maybe I just relieve stress in other ways.

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"?

[matunos]

You tell 'em! Just cause you have 3 drinks every day while you're socializing with your friends at the dive bar near the free clinic doesn't make you an alcoholic! Who says it does? I'll kick their damn ass! You can't talk about a person like... without knowing what... why their friends are the best guys in the whole... you should see when they're on the street and I told him 'look bub, you don't ever talk to a carney like that and not get a bit of dirt on your chin'. You're a real cool guy, y'know? We should get together sometime and hang out more. One time I saw this raccoon right out front of the door and I was like 'hey! what are we at war all about?!'... Zzzz...

Re:Stress?

[FoboldFKY]

I don't drink. But it's not because I'm a tightwad: I just hate the taste of alcohol. I can taste it in seemingly trace amounts in everything other than drinks with ridiculous amounts of sugar.

There is a smaller reason in that I've seen a lot of people, including friends, do... inadvisable things while drunk. The thought of not being in possession of my faculties and not being able to tell scares me.

I also know I have a somewhat addictive personality. So on the whole, I think I'll continue to not drink booze.

Re:Let's have them in lockup to cut down on doctor

[cayenne8]

I think it was Dean Martin who said it best:

"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."

Re:To be perfectly clear ...

[blueg3]

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

Re:Stress?

[cayenne8]

"I've never looked back on the night before and gone, "Man, that fifth of vodka was awesome! Lets do it again!"."

You're not doing it right!!

Re:They never define what a heavy drinker is.

[CheshireCatCO]

The article says that they define heavy drinking as more than three drinks a day.

Does that help?

Re:Here we go again

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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 ...?"

Atherosclerosis

[IdahoEv]

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.

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:*Wooooosh*

[Sir_Lewk]

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.