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Alcohol's Evaporating Health Benefits
New submitter Heart44 writes: A study in the British Medical Journal shows that consuming alcohol — any volume, any type — does not increase life expectancy. The full academic paper is not paywalled. From its conclusions: "Beneficial associations between low intensity alcohol consumption and all cause mortality may in part be attributable to inappropriate selection of a referent group and weak adjustment for confounders. Selection biases may also play a part." The associated editorial adds, "Firstly, in health as elsewhere, if something looks too good to be true, it should be treated with great caution. Secondly, health professionals should discourage suggestions that even low level alcohol use protects against cardiovascular disease and brings mortality benefits. Thirdly, health advice should come from health authorities, not from the alcohol industry, and, finally, the alcohol industry and its organizations should remove misleading references to health benefits from their information materials."
1. That giant frozen bullet train traveling at six times the speed of sound through crowded metropolitan areas is not only fake, but scientifically impossible.
2. Budweiser is found with friends and during good times, but is also accompanied by its lesser known entourage blurred vision, karaoke, screaming, and in high levels nudity and parking lot fits of vomiting.
3. The anthropomorphic frogs could never enunciate a trademarked brand name, and the black screaming "whats up" men were no more than modern day black minstrel charicatures. your black friends cannot be counted on to make this noise as consistently as claimed.
4. patron, fireball, hennessey, hypnotiq, and hundreds of other brands arent directly marketed to youth. Unless you count about a hundred different songs or more that directly associate them with happiness, friendship, and success.
5. 7 martinis and a suit makes you a vomiting insurance liability, not james bond.
6. Dogs and clydesdales do not drink or transport alcohol anymore. Alcohol is transported through a sophisticated network of trucking and trans national freight.
7. Your government lies to you about alcohol because it enjoys a sizeable degree of revenue from its sale through artificially imposed monopoly, driving checkpoints, fines, and incarceration.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Very misleading summary (yeah, duh). This is not a study, it is an editorial. Someone's opinion. It says so right at the top. Note at the bottom of the article; "Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed."
It's incredibly misleading to cite this article as a "study", all it is is an opinion piece article, nothing more.
Oh no... it's the future.
+1 And some hate that all the conversations are lost due to alcohool and therefore don't like to socialize with drunken idiots.
But in the morning I'll be sober and happy, but you will still be bitter.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Spoken like a true alcoholic.
That's ridiculous and irresponsible. Alcohol had positive health benefits in the past that are no longer relevant in much of the world. For example, the beer that the Egyptians were drinking had a lot more nutritional content in it than modern brews do. There were antibiotics and a lot more yeast. In the UK they drank beer because the alcohol helped to sterilize it.
These days most people have access to safe sources of water so that latter bit isn't relevant. And the former isn't relevant because we're not brewing it the same way that it was in the past.
Alcohol is poision, there's really no argument about that, the questions are how much can you consume, what are the trade offs and is there any other aspect of it that improves ones health enough to make up for the fact that it's a toxic substance.
Good Bourbon and Whiskey increase the QUALITY of life dramatically.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.