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UK Cuts Men's Recommended Weekly Alcohol To 14 Units (theguardian.com)
jones_supa writes: Men have been advised to drink no more than seven pints of beer a week – the same as the maximum limit for women – in the first new drinking guidelines to be released by the UK's chief medical officers for 20 years. They also advise there is no safe level of drinking for either sex, and issued a stark warning that any amount of alcohol consumption increases the risk of developing a range of cancers, particularly breast cancer. David Spiegelhalter from University of Cambridge said: 'These guidelines define 'low-risk' drinking as giving you less than a 1% chance of dying from an alcohol-related condition.'
There is nothing scientific about it, and the medical profession say the change has nothing to do with new scientific data. The sole motivation driving this was to make men equal to female.
As if this bullshit is going to reduce anyone with a penis to change their drinking habits. /s
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Moderate Alcohol Consumption Is Not Associated with Reduced All-cause Mortality.
"During 206,966 person-years of follow up, 7902 individuals died. No level of regular alcohol consumption was associated with reduced all-cause mortality. The hazard ratio and 95% confidence interval in fully adjusted analyses was 1.02 (0.94-1.11) for 7 drinks/week, 1.14 (1.02-1.28) for 7 to 14 drinks/week, 1.13 (0.96-1.35) for 14 to 21 drinks/week, and 1.45 (1.16-1.81) for 21 drinks/week.
CONCLUSIONS:
Moderate alcohol consumption is not associated with reduced all-cause mortality in older adults. The previously observed association may have been due to residual confounding."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
RESULTS:
Male sex, being physically active, and good health status were independently associated with light to moderate drinking (P .001). An apparent protective effect of light to moderate drinking on mortality was evident in the unadjusted analysis and after adjusting for age, sex, risk factors, and cardiovascular events (adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) = 0.77, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.68-0.88, P .001), but after also adjusting for PASE and VAS, the relationship was no longer significant (aHR = 0.92, 95% CI = 0.80-1.05, P = .19). Follow-up physical activity was associated with baseline alcohol consumption; baseline physical activity did not predict alcohol consumption during follow-up.
CONCLUSION:
After accounting for health status and physical activity, light to moderate alcohol drinking had no direct protective effect on mortality.
You must be fun at parties
Don't make fun of the designated driver.
And what is a Unit? Metric values should be used.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The biggest annoyance here is that we feel we should follow the guidelines - the assumption is that medical guidance should be followed, without taking into account that you are definitely going to die someday so your life shouldn't be about avoiding it at all costs.
If people were immortal except for the effects that might kill us, then yes it makes sense to do your best to mitigate those risks. But we're all going to die after 80 or 90 years of life, so how do you want to spend those years? Starving yourself (mild hunger is best for longevity), eating healthy but borderline boring food, avoiding all mind-altering substances. It doesn't feel like a life, it's hardly exploring the bounds of existence is it? Yes I'm sure some ultra-smug teetotallers will be able to get some sad satisfaction from this news, (yay other people's misery), but given that the human race has *always* sought out chemical mood alteration, perhaps it should be something we accept as a basic need. If not alcohol, then what? There are a bunch of essentially harmless synthetic drugs that we criminalise for no good reason, that at the very least would be better than alcohol.
Discourage alcohol, but then accept that people will take drugs of some sort, so what should you encourage?
Here in the Netherlands we have muslims for that.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
That isn't a problem - there are no medical bills when you're dead.
Having just lost a friend whose breast cancer started 10 years ago, I'm acutely aware that if you die of cancer there can be huge medical bills before you are dead. (or there would be, if it wasn't all taken care of by the NHS as it was in this case).
One unit of alcohol (UK) is defined as 10 millilitres (8 grams) of pure alcohol.
Although not an SI unit it is metric - it's just broken into an easier measure for many people to use (depending on the drink you're having you can approximate it between 1-3 Units and count the number of Units you're having that way).
One unit is 10 ml of pure alcohol The link gives some more useful examples in terms of actual drinks e.g. about half a pint of beer.
After accounting for health status and physical activity, light to moderate alcohol drinking had no direct protective effect on mortality.
That is where one can be mislead by the article, as they are talking about an increase in health problems, not an increase in mortality. Specifically they talk about cancers, which in most cases are seen very late in life. So, basically, you have a small increase in added health issues right before you die.
"Boozing is unsafe at 'any level', thunders chief UK.gov quack: Show us your science. What? You mean you don't have any?" By Andrew Orlowski in The Register on 8 Jan 2016 at 16:02
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
see http://understandinguncertaint...
Wait, US is that country where you can't even drink in the streets and people resort to making fake IDs (!) to drink.
I think that may be why you are afraid of such "totalitarian" policies as you reading or hearing on TV or radio about a recommendation once in a while. What such evil "government" intrusion (if somehow physicians and University of Cambridge count as "the government").
The reality though is it's you Americans who are fined and jailed for drinking and jay walking and so on, AND you get little "socialized" healthcare. So I don't think oppression and healthcare are actually related.
Alcohol has a biological effect that I enjoy.
Like, say, caffeine. Or adrenaline.
How ALL of the posts ranting that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, that all studies show damaging health effects, etc, are AC. Not one rabid teetotaler will put his name to his posts.
The problem is that 'unit' requires knowledge that isn't easy to transfer between countries. If internationally recognized units were used it would be understandable for everyone without having to know sizes of beers&drinks specific to a country.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.