Slashdot Mirror
Alcohol Is Good for Your Heart -- Most of the Time (time.com)
Alcohol, in moderation, has a reputation for being healthy for the heart. Drinking about a glass of wine for women per day, and two glasses for men, is linked to a lower risk of heart attack, stroke and death from heart disease. From a report on Time: A new study of nearly two million people published in The BMJ adds more evidence that moderate amounts of alcohol appear to be healthy for most heart conditions -- but not all of them. The researchers analyzed the link between alcohol consumption and 12 different heart ailments in a large group of U.K. adults. None of the people in the study had cardiovascular disease when the study started. People who did not drink had an increased risk for eight of the heart ailments, ranging from 12 percent to 56 percent, compared to people who drank in moderation. These eight conditions include the most common heart events, such as heart attack, stroke and sudden heart-related death.
I really hate these studies, because they don't give us actionable information.
What I'd like to see:
-Those that never drank in their lives vs those that drank moderately vs those that were heavy drinkers at a younger age and drink moderately now vs those that were moderate drinkers and quit, and several other permutations.
-"Drinks per day/week" replaced with "ml of pure alcohol per kg of body weight, per day/week". A woman drinking a "glass" of wine at 110 lbs is not the same as a man drinking a "beer" at 300 lbs, and both the wine and the beer can vary wildly from one size glass to another, or a 5% standard beer vs a 7-10% craft beer.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I don't drink every day. When I do it feels like a habit and it is less enjoyable, so I limit myself to one or two drinks a week. How many people fall into this group?
love is just extroverted narcissism
So is this another study that doesn't differentiate between 'never drink' and people who drank so much that they had to quit for health reasons and thus 'no longer drink'?
Studies that differentiate between the two tend to show that the never drink people are the healthiest, it is the drank to near death and quit that skew the numbers - and thus the '1 or 2 glasses' are only healthier relative to heavy drinking not to actual abstinence.
... you're clearly not reading the same article as the rest of us. From the article:
The study's findings are particularly interesting because the researchers separated drinkers into categories that are typically lumped together in these kinds of studies. "Non-drinkers" often include people who have never drank, as well as those who quit drinking (who may have been heavy drinkers in the past, and so may have a higher risk of heart problems). This may have inflated the risk of non-drinkers; in some cases, grouping people this way might make drinking alcohol look better for the heart than it actually is.
Are the people likely to have heart problems report high levels of perceived stress?
1 glass of wine doesn't even use up your quiescent ADH levels. It is quickly metabolized. The third and fourth glasses are past the point that the metabolization rate is determined by the production rate of ADH and so stays around a lot longer.
It might affect your athletic performance, but a single glass of wine a day makes little measurable difference to most people, other than it's enjoyable to drink.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Lowering stress leads to a longer, healthier life.
More at 11.
The linked article quotes relative risk ratios for specific ailments without giving the baseline. This is a sure sign of an incompetent journalist and hides the actiual result.
E.G. 10% increase of dying of X
Compared with: Probability of dying from X went from 0.001 to 0.0011.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
So is this another study that doesn't differentiate between 'never drink' and people who drank so much that they had to quit for health reasons and thus 'no longer drink'?
I know this is Slashdot so you are not expected to read the article but really you could not be more wrong if you tried. From the article:
The study's findings are particularly interesting because the researchers separated drinkers into categories that are typically lumped together in these kinds of studies. "Non-drinkers" often include people who have never drank, as well as those who quit drinking (who may have been heavy drinkers in the past, and so may have a higher risk of heart problems).
If you actually go further and click on the link to the BMJ article then they have "Non-drinker" and "Former drinker" categories with both of these showing statistically equivalent rates of cardiovascular and heart disease in the categories they looked at and in all cases both categories were statistically significantly higher than the rate for moderate drinkers.
So your assertion is completely wrong: their data show that even if you have never drunk alcohol you will have a reduced risk of heart disease if you start drinking moderately with a sample size of ~136k people. To me this looks like extremely convincing evidence that moderate drinking increases heart health.
Makes me wonder if the rate of drinking is going down because it is not a necessity. They are searching for profit. Same garbage statistics on coffee. They used to have a search on " 100 reasons why coffee is bad for you but they scrubbed it from the Web.
Usual headline for article about studies performed by doctors, studies funded by companies in the Napa county area of Calif when wine sales are sluggish. Need positive articles to help boost sales. I haven't RFTA, done data analysis on wine sales, but I wonder at times...
mfwright@batnet.com
Back about 10 years ago one of my doctors suggested that I drink a glass of wine every evening after dinner. I tried and tried, but I couldn't stand it. I tried red wine, white wine, cheap wine, and expensive wine. None of it was tasty enough to make me want to drink it every day. I'd rather have a glass of cold water.
Now, I have gout and there's no way I can drink any alcoholic beverage. Alcohol goes to the liver and burns through ATP like it was kindling, and the result is more uric acid in the bloodstream (look it up). A glass of wine or beer each night and I'd have a gout flare up like you've never seen.
...now if it was only good for your LIVER and kidneys too.
I wonder if drinking gasoline is good for one organ before it destroys the rest of your body.
Dark beers are made by toasting malt, the Maillard reaction. Which at high temperatures can produce carcinogens (acrylamide) that are soluble in ethanol.
I seriously doubt it's in high enough quantities to matter, but it should exist if I understand it correctly. And likely there are beneficial things in a pint of Guinness worthy of research.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Bodyfat is how the body stores calories for use as energy. Unless you're eating ATP you're not going to get direct energy from any food source.
Unless you're burning more energy than you're eating and you have no glycogen or fat stores, this doesn't matter.
If you are burning more energy than you're eating and you have no glycogen or fat stores, you're going to die unless you eat something like straight sugar right now.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It's not that concentrated in your blood, or else it would kill you.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Can someone please warn me that alcohol leads to fun, and fun is bad, or something?
Or how if we never smoke, drank, partied, climbed dangerous rocks, adventured, or sought adrenaline that we would literally live forever?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
So if 2 is good, 6 or more must be GREAT, amiright?
Drinking about a glass of wine for women per day, and two glasses for men
I drink a glass of wine for women per day, and two glasses for men, and several for children. I think that's 8 or 9.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Because alcohol carries a risk of liver disease, there are safer ways to lower risk, he says, such as quitting smoking, exercising regularly and eating a healthy diet.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I haven't read any studies on being drunk and its effect on the ability to comprehend scientific studies.
FWIW, apparently there is real thing called state dependent memory. There are actually studies you can read about this.
As a personal anecdote, in university, if I studied for an exam when drunk (which was occasionally), I realized tended did much better if I was also a bit drunk when I actually took the exam (not a hang-over, but just a bit buzzed). I was also a much better bridge player when I was drunk. I suspect that being a bit drunk allows you to be a bit more creative and think outside the box, which might be good for recall or problem solving on an exam, but perhaps the effect is not relavent for reading/comprehending the scientific discoveries of other people. But I'm not aware of any studies on the comprehension aspect, but it isn't inconceivable that it has positive aspects.
In any case, it might be better to read these studies whilst drunk, if you want to remember them whilst partaking in a drunk BS pissing match ;^)
I think you may have been my grad school adviser.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The good news is that if you drink enough, it won't matter if you have health insurance.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Surprisingly, an IT site has a better article and data...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
For goodness sake do not walk outside, particularly if there is traffic around. Nitrogen Dioxide is great at cell mutation. Lets face it pal your body is awash with mutagens and most of the time it does a pretty good job of fixing its genetic damage. I think we lack data on whether small amounts of alcohol are significantly worse than all the other crap we subject ourselves to, and alcohol at least makes life more fun for most people. I do totally agree though that it is correlated with cancer in large quantities and most people ignore that bit.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
But by god in college we tried to get it there. I'm actually surprised that the worst thing that ever happened in college was the still drunk the next afternoon or the time a buddy jump, kicked with both feet a lamp post, and then stuck the landing only to moments later get picked up by the cops and taken to spin dry for the night. Our general rule was that you weren't trying if you didn't finish a 1L of captain.
Time to offend someone
Calories from alcohol can't even be used for energy, they're just turned straight into bodyfat
No, it can be used for energy after a few conversion steps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not so quick. The body will convert its protein stores (i.e. muscles) to energy before dying.
I think you may have been my grad school adviser.
If I were a grad school adviser, my advice would be not to go to grad school... ;^)
We do studies which do measure self-reports of alcohol consumption over long duration periods (e.g. years).
In general, what most of these studies tend to say is:
A. Don't binge drink.
B. No, seriously, stop.
C. If female, there tend not to be positive effects of drinking more than one drink per day. No, don't add up all the alcohol from the week and drink it at one party.
D. If male, 2-3 drinks a day may have a positive effect. Some of that is because men tend to be bad at socializing. Some of the positive impact and lower stress is from the socializing. Drinking all this alcohol in one sitting by yourself in the dark is probably very bad for you. Get a drink or two with family or friends, especially at a meal. Drinking on an empty stomach tends to be bad for you.
E. Don't drive or operate machinery while drinking or shortly after that.
F. We told you to stop binge drinking. Seriously. Stop doing it. Especially in the basement and then passing out.
G. Stop writing code when you're drinking. No, it doesn't help.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Executive Summary of study: heavy drinking leads to increased transmission of STDs, and increased pregnancy in heterosexuals.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
1 glass of wine doesn't even use up your quiescent ADH levels. It is quickly metabolized. The third and fourth glasses are past the point that the metabolization rate is determined by the production rate of ADH and so stays around a lot longer.
Does this apply to those who turn red after drinking even a 1/2 glass of wine as well???
I can't tell you anything about beer. But I am an expert on wine.
A good whine will be loud enough to get attention, but not too loud. The finer whines will elicit just the right reaction of sympathy that is the mark of a great whine. The best whines will not only get what you are whining for, but won't leave any after taste of annoyance. Ideally the person being manipulated will believe it was their own idea with no sense of manipulation.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
That's good news! After 21 years of sobriety I finally have an excuse to drink again! BTW: What does "moderation" mean?
This is why most of these studies say it's OK to have the two drinks; but they also say you shouldn't start drinking if you aren't already.
I think we are just at the brink of finally getting past statistical medicine and in to something much better. Statistical medicine is like Newtonian physics. It serves you well up to a point. To really do advanced things, we need to get beyond it and get to an understanding based on each individual's genetic makeup and environment.
It's only recently that they acknowledged the basics, such as Ambien effecting women differently than men!
Anyway, the mechanisms going on in your body might be such that you can't drink. You might be part of a large, but distinct minority. In a world that's moved beyond statistical medicine, the studies will say things like "Men over 40 with Gen profile signatures X2, N353, and G872 should not drink. Women over 50 with the same signatures should have one per day".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
it's not they have worse health because they don't drink. It's they don't drink because they have bad health.
Not so quick. The body will convert its protein stores (i.e. muscles) to energy before dying.
If you have standard Western metabolic disorder, your body will convert its protein stores to energy even if there's lots of fat both floating around and stored in adipose tissue. Your brain will ignore the leptin your fat cells are producing, the insulin will tell your fat cells to hang onto the fat and you will be hungry regardless. This is the essence of metabolic disorder. That is what it is. It does not explain why, which if we understood fully we would solve the problem. Low carb is an effective hack to reduce insulin so your brain sees the leptin again, you stop being hungry and insulin drops so fat from fat cells gets used. But this only lasts until the fat cells are empty enough and the Leptin goes away - then you are depressed and hungry. It is why post obese people are not like people who've been lean all their lives. It is why calorie counting is bullshit - it ignores the broken feedback in the system.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
1 glass of wine doesn't even use up your quiescent ADH levels. It is quickly metabolized. The third and fourth glasses are past the point that the metabolization rate is determined by the production rate of ADH and so stays around a lot longer.
Does this apply to those who turn red after drinking even a 1/2 glass of wine as well???
Asian glow? I suspect not, but I've never read a peer reviewed paper that addresses the issue, so I would be spouting bullshit if I claimed to know. I suspect not because that is caused by a lack of an enzyme to process a breakdown product and I've forgotten all the names and I'm not looking it up right now.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Of course you could probably also show that uptight tea-teetotalers are generally joyless curmudgeons...
Well, to be fair, they're not all curmudgeons... ;)
"I realized tended did much better" LOL
Fortunately, I graduated STEM, not liberal arts ;^b
One of these days there will be grammar checker as well as a spell checker on text entry boxes, but apparently I won't be the one to invent that...
Now we just have to figure out how to prevent it from slowly destroying the rest of our bodies and we'll be all set! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
As with most studied, the really interesting parts are hidden in the data.
A few things should be kept in mind. For example, there was a huge difference in two characteristics of the subpopulations. Non-drinkers and former drinkers had much higher incidence of diabetes and being socially deprived compared to moderate drinkers. This is mentioned in the research article but not the Time article. When adjustments for systolic blood pressure, diabetes status, body mass index, HDL-cholesterol, use of statins or blood pressure lowering medication, and whether offered dietary advice were made, the benefits for moderate drinkers decreased but still somewhat remained for some diseases.
However, there was no adjustment for social class. It would have been extremely interesting to see the results with adjustments for social class, or even better just to see the raw numbers for each social class. 30.6% of the non-drinkers were socially deprived ("Most deprived 5th of socioeconomic deprivation") compared to 15.7% of moderate drinkers. That looks like a significant disparity for a characteristic that would seem to correlate strongly with bad health.
Actually, that's probably what OP was referring to: ADH - Alcohol dehydrogenase
That's what I'm thinking too, but I don't actually know. I'd have to go an read up on it. Where's a biochemist when you need one?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
it occurs to me to wonder if the researchers are certain it is the alcohol in the wine, or some other factor in the wine.
That's possible. But I suspect it has more to do with lower stress; either a bit of alcohol helps people relax, or people who have a drink or two were less wound up in the first place. It could well be the latter - many teetotalers I know are weird about other things in their life as well.
I have read in Science & vie, a french science magazine, that many studies are sponsored by the booze industry itself. So this idea of 'one glass of wine each day is good for you' is probably false unfortunately. Bias are introduced by putting together in the non-drinker group ex heavy drinker that have quit. That way, non-drinker do not stand out as much.
State dependance is very real. When we wrote, and rehearsed, material with the last major band I was in, we smoked quite a bit oif the ol ganja. But even though we had our parts down, when performiing live I absolutely could not remember how these tunes started out at all, among other problems, until we had some herb. Basically until several bars went by I had to fake it Of course after 100 times of playing them I finally got it, but basically, if we wrote it while smoking, we had to perform it wafter smoking. It was also the same with alcohol.. except in this case, when I was a regular drinker, I needed a couple of pints or my playing suffered. Apparemnly it was the same with other musicians I talked to... ;-)
The thing was, when I cut back on drinking to only occasionally having a pint, I found my playing suffered after a few pints, whereas before easily twice as much actually improved it. Herb, however, still improved the groove even if I only occasionally indulged. *if* I could remember where I was in the tune and didn't get lost