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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.'"

6 of 470 comments (clear)

  1. Eh by mark72005 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

    1. Re:Eh by insertwackynamehere · · Score: 5, Funny

      moderate parent up

      but not too much!

  2. Well yea... by Last_Available_Usern · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. Re:Stress? by Sinistar2k · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Atherosclerosis by IdahoEv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
  5. Re:Three drinks a day is "heavy"? by matunos · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...