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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."
It makes you wonder about this study. One would think that socializing, as promoted by moderate alcohol consumption would have a massive improvement on health and lifespan. If this study is not seeing that then either the assumption that happiness among freinds is a boon is wrong or that alcohol entirely offsets that. The third possibility, that they controlled for this, I'll dismiss. Finding people who socialized without alcohol would put this control group in rare company; they would biased comparables. I'm not saying one needs to drink so socialize. I know many people that don't and do. I just think the groups would not be comparable.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Because women are objects with no agency. Her choosing to get drunk is meaningless. Next you will tell me regret after sex means the initial act was rape too or perhaps she is not responsible for driving drunk because she didn't consent to driving.
I will give you black out drunk == no consent
girl had a few drinks and is drunk == no consent is bullshit.
The quiet truth is that if you are sick or have any real health issues, you stop drinking alcohol. Alcohol is a powerful drug that affects your body in many ways. If you are not healthy, you often can not drink it.
Moreover, most healthy people in the US drink alcohol. It is one of the primary social activities that people engage in. Look at dating events, they almost always alcohol.
As such, people that do not drink alcohol fall into three general categories. Religious, Sickly, and Ex-Alcoholics.
So cause and effect were reversed. Being healthy lets you drink alcohol, rather than drinking alcohol making you healthy.
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A study in the British Medical Journal shows that consuming alcohol — any volume, any type — does not increase life expectancy.
That is the type of conclusions you get when you entrust research to the "scientitsts" types who never leave the lab.
Alcohol helps overcome stress, which otherwise would cause more harm to health than the alcohol
Alcohol helps to "loosen" up, which these days seems to be the only reason why western civilization is still procreating. Being born is the biggest health benefit a human can experience in their life.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Aspartame. Oh wait, no they didn't. They just took the paid-for conclusion by the FDA that ant killer makes a safe substitute for refined sugar.
Thalidomide. Oh wait, no, they completely ignore the MASSES of evidence of the harmful effects of thalidomide (missing limbs, protruding spinal clusters, etc) and give the go ahead to reintroduce it as a fucking antidepressant!
Dietery fat and its connection to heart disease. Oh, wait, nope again. Not one single peer reviewed study into the connection at all, ever, anywhere by anybody yet the BMJ continues to publish unfounded claims that fat=bad.
The resurgence of poliomyelitis and the concurrent (some might say contemporaneous) emergence of a previously little-known condition variously called Lou Gehrig's Disease, ALS, Motor Neurone Disease, Post Polio Residual Paralysis... all sharing the same root cause and displaying shockingly similar symptomology yet the BMJ being an industrial journal pursues the industry line that it's most certainly definitely NOT actually caused by the live polio vaccine in spite of ample evidence that puts it beyond the Black Swan level of anomaly and firmly into the "merits further study" box.
When somebody says something is impossible, and someone else proves them wrong by a SINGLE proof sample, that's not an anomaly, that's SCIENCE.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I see so many eating bland vegan diets, thinking it's so good for them; I doubt any of them will live longer than typical omnivores.
And now studies are showing that while vegetarians do have a "healthier" weight on average they are overall less healthy and live shorter lives than omnivores.
Something rather important is that all or virtually all of that effect is in your socialization and expectations around alcohol, not the alcohol itself. There are plenty of classic studies showing that people who believe they consume alcohol, behave as if they really did - and conversely, that alcohol does very little to your inhibitions unless you figure out that's what they're feeding you.
So no, it doesn't really make you do things you normally wouldn't do. It just gives you an excuse - one your surroundings believe in, and one you probably believe in yourself.
If we didn't have alcohol, I bet that either we would find something else and ascribe inhibition-reducing properties to it, or we would act slightly less inhibited all week instead of just concentrated to friday night.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The real take home lesson for this is not to put much faith in any observational study.
Right - there was a study out just a month or two ago that demonstrated that a few specific genotypes process alcohol differently than others and do have a real benefit. No doubt _this_ study was in publication before that one came out.
Most of these broad pronouncements for a population are worthless - humans aren't so homogenous.
Still, unless you know you have that genotype, you may be doing yourself harm, especially in regards to cancer, so take it easy on the hootch.
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In the UK they drank beer because the alcohol helped to sterilize it.
No, they didn't. Beer (even real beer, still generally no more than about 12% alcohol) doesn't have enough alcohol in it to "sterilize" much of anything. Beer was safer because it had been brewed (i.e. boiled), and afterward the yeast helped to keep out harmful microbes.
So... close, but not quite.
There was no concept of microbial disease back then. So they didn't really know why beer didn't make them sick but the water did. They just noticed it and took advantage of it.
So now men are expected to be mind readers, sussing out a woman's mental state? Are you serious. We're notoriously bad at figuring this out.
The real problem that YOU'RE tuning out is that women should be treated equally under the law. If a man were to be 'coerced' into drinking, he'd be responsible for his actions (up to, and including calling a fucking cab.) Women should not be excused for poor decision making simply because of consuming a few too many free drinks from the shady dude at the end of the bar.
Since Slashdot is full of pedantic twats, the situation I am NOT describing is a guy having sex with a girl who's passed out. That's rape, and that's wrong. but a girl who's had a few too many drinks is just as responsible for her body and her actions as a guy in the same situation. Either women are equal to men in terms of agency and responsibility, or they're not. The SJW machine does not get to pick and choose elements of equality to go by.