Slashdot Mirror
No Healthy Level of Alcohol Consumption, Says Major Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Even the occasional drink is harmful to health, according to the largest and most detailed research carried out on the effects of alcohol, which suggests governments should think of advising people to abstain completely. The uncompromising message comes from the authors of the Global Burden of Diseases study, a rolling project based at the University of Washington, in Seattle, which produces the most comprehensive data on the causes of illness and death in the world. Alcohol, says their report published in the Lancet medical journal, led to 2.8 million deaths in 2016. It was the leading risk factor for premature mortality and disability in the 15 to 49 age group, accounting for 20% of deaths. The study was carried out by researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), who investigated levels of alcohol consumption and health effects in 195 countries between 1990 to 2016. They used data from 694 studies to work out how common drinking was and from 592 studies including 28 million people worldwide to work out the health risks. According to the report, "27.1% of cancer deaths in women and 18.9% in men over 50 were linked to their drinking habits." The biggest causes of death linked to alcohol in younger people were tuberculosis (1.4% of deaths), road injuries (1.2%), and self-harm (1.1%).
"Worldwide we need to revisit alcohol control policies and health programs, and to consider recommendations for abstaining from alcohol," said the report's senior author, Professor Emmanuela Gakidou. "These include excise taxes on alcohol, controlling the physical availability of alcohol and the hours of sale, and controlling alcohol advertising. Any of these policy actions would contribute to reductions in population-level consumption, a vital step toward decreasing the health loss associated with alcohol use."
"Worldwide we need to revisit alcohol control policies and health programs, and to consider recommendations for abstaining from alcohol," said the report's senior author, Professor Emmanuela Gakidou. "These include excise taxes on alcohol, controlling the physical availability of alcohol and the hours of sale, and controlling alcohol advertising. Any of these policy actions would contribute to reductions in population-level consumption, a vital step toward decreasing the health loss associated with alcohol use."
...how many ugly people got laid because of alcohol?
And how many babies got made because of alcohol?
I wonder if the number of lives created by alcohol's ability to facilitate sex is greater than the number of deaths it causes.
Plants grow better in hydroponic conditions with carefully calibrated nutrient solution and perfect amounts of light and carbon dioxide. They thrive, but their roots are weak.
We can min-max humans the same way, prioritizing lifespan above all else. Remove all risk and danger, anything harmful to the body. Clearly it's irrational to hurt yourself in any way, so why allow it?
I'm not saying there aren't issues with excessive alcohol consumption, but fearmongering and efforts to create government policy restricting it are naive and don't address the issue of why people drink in the first place.
The summary is this:
Which just sounds like a lot of malarkey.
So they combined a bunch of data sources together (likely of very different quality, measures, etc), massaged it together to "estimate population level consumption by tourists", the massaged it a bit more, made some more estimates here and there... and BOOM alcohol is resposible for x% of cancer!
This is the kind of stuff that gives science a bad name. Where's the control? There isn't any. This barely qualifies as science.
People aren't going to stop drinking. We tried that already, and it didn't work out so well. It just feels too damn good to have a drink now and a again after the day is over. It's worth it! Frankly even if have a 10% increase in cancer from 1 drink a day, I'll take it. Do I really care if I have a 11% chance of cancer with an occasional drink vs an 10% chance of cancer with zero?
Realistically it just can't be THAT bad for you since we'd see large effects between drinkers and non-drinkers. Smoking, for instance increases your chance of lung cancer (over your lifetime) by a factor of 17. That is, smokers have about a 17% lifetime chance of getting lung cancer, and non-smokers have a 1% chance. That's HUGE, and the kind of thing we should be concerned about. But alcohol? Nonsense, the effect just can't be very big, or else we'd see it more obviously in the existing data.
If they really wanted to study this, take some similar populations. Study Mormons vs Ex-Mormons, or practicing vs non-practicing Muslims. But don't take data from 694 different studies and then do some weird data manipulation on it. Quite honestly, how do they know if they're right, or they just managed to tweak the data in the right way?
Countries with the highest rates of drinking: Denmark and Norway
Countries with the lowest rates of drinking: Pakistan and Bangladesh.
I'm betting people are happier in Denmark and Norway vs. Pakistan and Bangladesh. They certainly are wealthier, healthier, and live longer.
Maybe drinking is good?
The slashdot title stated the most sensational part of the study, but the summary left out the single-most important statement in the entire study:
"The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 00–08) standard drinks per week."
This statement is at odds with some studies and the hopes of many recreational drinkers. However, there have been other meta-studies that have found that studies that find a health benefit from moderate drinking often aggregate teetotalers due to religion/philosophy with teetotalers due to illness.
If that ceases to be a major cause of death, what is next? Obesity? We get told off for that, too.
So what will people die from in the future? Too much exercising? terminal anxiety? boredom?
How should we go about preventing those deaths and then, ultimately, at what point will all these studies, research groups and advice-givers give up and admit that everybody is going to die from something. What causes of death will be deemed "natural"?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The same logic means that there is no safe level of cycling If we stop drinking becasue there is no safe level of alcohol, will we also stop cycling, swimming and all the other activities that have some risk of of injury but are nonetheless fun?
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Too many people are hung up about quantity of life, not quality of life.
I am fat (for somebody in Europe) that my doctor asked me if I was willing to change my life habits, meaning eating and drinking. I said no.
I do not want to get old. I know what getting old is. My great-aunt was 115. She was healthy. My parents lived to an above average age and also lived, not just existed.
If I die, I die. At least I had fun.
And what greater fun that having a few drinks in great company of friends? In the end, that is all that matters. And I know. My great aunt told me, as well as other old people. And if you look at the photo on Wikipedia that I took, she is taking some advocaat at the age of 113.
Oh and on the WIki page, the thing about wisdom she told about hering and orange juice was not completely true.
She said it because she did not want to say anything about alcohol, because kids would read the newspaper and take it out of context. When _I_ asked her why she became so old, the answer was "Luck. Somebody has to be the oldest and by pure luck, this time it is me."
And even as the oldest person, she choose quality of life over quantity.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If you are really worried about quality of life, you would lose weight. Furthermore, it's not just about living longer: obese people have sucky lives for the last several years. Stop bloviating and take care of yourself.
https://www.etymonline.com/wor...
assassin (n.)
1530s (in Anglo-Latin from mid-13c.), via French and Italian, from Arabic hashishiyyin "hashish-users," plural of hashishiyy, from the source of hashish (q.v.).
A fanatical Ismaili Muslim sect of the mountains of Lebanon in the time of the Crusades, under leadership of the "Old Man of the Mountains" (translates Arabic shaik-al-jibal, name applied to Hasan ibu-al-Sabbah), they had a reputation for murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish. The plural suffix -in was mistaken in Europe for part of the word (compare Bedouin). Middle English had the word as hassais (mid-14c.), from Old French hassasis, assasis, which is from the Arabic word.
You are confusing etymology with historical accuracy.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Have any studies been done comparing the effects of edibles vs. smoked cannabis to double-check and ensure there are no negative effects? I use edibles myself, but I realize upon reading your comment that I just assumed it was safer because I wasn't inhaling anything. I wonder if they're metabolized differently, resulting in different effects on the body.