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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.
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.
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
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 ;^)
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/...
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! --
BINGO! (or YAHTZEE! if you prefer)
THIS issue is the primary one I really want to see categorized - - - Do the 'moderate' drinkers have a less stressful life style because they occasionally consume a bit of alcohol _vs_ the teetotallers that don't drink at all (for whatever reason) and the related stresses of the teetotallers lifestyle of FORCED exclusion of relaxing lifestyle issues.
Basically, is the occasional drinker more likely to have a better life-orientation due to the 'tolerant' attitude . . . and thus have a less stressful life than the Abstentionist attitude and lifestyle of the teetotaller ?
Can anyone point to any studies that correlate the effects of a relaxed attitude towards life vs the restrictive attitude of the teetotallers and the stress incurred by their restrictive outlook ? ? ?
There HAS to be some link between a 'relaxed' attitude and a 'restrictive, totally intolerant' attitude when comparing lifestyles and heart-related issues . . . just about everyone knows that restrictive life regimes DO tend to over-tax the heart with stress-related hormonal damage compared to the 'easy going' lifestyles that just let the pressures and stresses wash over them without getting bent out of shape !
Here's tipping (toasting) one to the easy-goers living longer (and better) than the induced highly over-stressed teetotallers ! ! !
Hell, even if the occasional imbibers don't actually live longer, they really DO live better without the stresses of structuring their life to TOTALLY exclude certain activities - and the worries, pressures, internal stresses, etc. induced by their intolerant and restrictive outlooks.
cheers . . .
redneck geek
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.
Of course you could probably also show that uptight tea-teetotalers are generally joyless curmudgeons...
Well, to be fair, they're not all curmudgeons... ;)