No Alcohol is Good

Nooooooooooooo!
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/23/health/global-alcohol-study/index.html

 

Fake news for sure

 

From reading other articles on the same announcement, the takeaway was that the individual risk compared to non-drinkers was not substantial but seen as an aggregate the societal risk is colossal.

 

Pretty much sums it up:

"There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving," Spiegelhalter, who also was not involved in the research, said in a statement. "Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention."

 

"Not all drugs are good. Some of them are GREAT!" - Bill Hicks

 

Yeah, I figure drinking is killing me, but I want to have the feeling that it is somehow good for my health.

 

Have you ever read about the health risks of Dihydrogen Monoxide? Everything you read says it is absolutely essential to life but is responsible for numerous catastrophes. A tablespoon of it can be lethal!

 

Leaving aside all the non-biological impacts (like DUI and the "Hold my beer and watch this" Darwin Award competitions) moderate alcohol consumption likely has some benefit to some body parts, while trashing others.

C'est la vie. Life without homebrew ain't living at all

Cheers!

 

China makes up 17% of the population but by that graph it look like they account for half of the alcohol related deaths. I sure wouldn't put it past China to falsify numbers to fortify their agenda and with that much spin, the whole report is useless.

 

This isn't news.
Alcohol has been a known carcinogen since 1988, so no amount is "safe" to consume.

Sorry you're just now discovering this.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/824237

 

Abstaining from alcohol won't make you live longer but it will sure make it feel as if you did.

 

Not drinking beer may not kill you, but why take the chance.

 

You know what cancer is, right?

 

Alcohol is a known poison. Maybe its not politically correct to say that here on HBT, but its the truth. Lower levels of alcohol ARE MORE DANGEROUS than no alcohol, its a fact, deal with it. I choose to poison myself on a regular basis. Some people call it self-medication, I call it enjoying life.
You can decide for yourself what is best for you.
At some level, the US is still a FREE COUNTRY.

 

No, please explain.

 

+1

 

Troll hungry. Om nom nom!

 

Cancer? Never heard of her.

 

Damn, getting my affairs in order...

 

You or me?

 

Cancer? Nearly killed'er.

 

I temporarily gave up drinking a few years ago, with the intent on cleaning up my liver. No physical withdrawal, but evenings after work seemed flat and boring. At first my wife encouraged my dry out, but after 3 weeks, she said, "maybe your should have some beer." Pretty sure what that means about me, oh well, started drinking beer way to young in life, but can't do anything about that now.

On a science note, I recall hearing of two studies regarding long term drinkers, that stopping drinking completely increased risk of certain type of liver cancer, and another that it increased likelihood of type of dementia. That is not to say either of these conditions would not be better off if regular drinking had not been adopted early in life.

I think about this stuff, but don't worry about it as much as I used to.

 

If you look at the original study, the effect size is so small as to be worthless for making a decision at the individual level. This post does a good job of explaining the issues.

https://medium.com/wintoncentre/the-risks-of-alcohol-again-2ae8cb006a4a

Short version: moderate alcohol use is probably fine.

 

100% of the people I ever loved and died ate carrots. Ergo, avoid carrots!

Point 2...Healthy people just take longer to die.

 

Bit of a side note. Had a chest incident last year which sent me to the hospital. They gave me a stress test. I was 50. One of the technicians started martial arts so as the treadmill was going we were chatting it up going faster and faster.

Well this whole time my wife was telling them how much I drink...I consider this a Craft Beer Hobby and suck down 10% bombers all the time. In the end, no issues were found with the heart. They even mentioned drinking beer will not kill the liver. It's the folks who drink a quart of hard liquor a day for decades that'll see problems. My uncle was one. He died at 63 but was a heavy drinker his whole life. The technicians said it's smoking that's the killer; heart, cancer. Beer is not the issue. As a matter of fact, unfiltered beer...homebrew...has a number of benificial vitamins/minerals and phytonutrients.

Since my wife smokes, I got the last nasty look in!

 

I just glanced through that article. So Basicly .1% of the drinking population die of alcohol related incidences/disease. Wow, how fuccking scared are we supposed to be of that?

It's 3% for smokers.

 

Agree!

 

The more you do something the better you get at it the safer it becomes. So...

 

From cancer.gov it appears that it is too late for me anyway, not that I would stop drinking beer this late in life:

What happens to cancer risk after a person stops drinking alcohol?

Most of the studies that have examined whether cancer risk declines after a person stops drinking alcohol have focused on head and neck cancers and on esophageal cancer. In general, these studies have found that stopping alcohol consumption is not associated with immediate reductions in cancer risk. The cancer risks eventually decline, although it may take years for the risks of cancer to return to those of never drinkers.

For example, ex-drinkers still had higher risks of oral cavity and pharyngeal cancers than never drinkers even 16 years after they stopped drinking alcohol, although it was lower than before they stopped drinking (34). One study estimated that it would take more than 35 years for the higher risks of laryngeal and pharyngeal cancers associated with alcohol consumption to decrease to the level of never drinkers (35).

That website also says that 3.5% of US cancer deaths are alcohol-attributable which I suppose means the other 96.5% of cancer deaths are attributable to something else.

 

About 20,000 deaths per year in the US.

 

Interesting. My research shows <4 drinks / day is fairly low risk. This supports that. I do < 20 std. drinks / week, drink slowly, keep bac <.05. My working out probably offsets some of this.