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On the one hand, drinking alcohol may make you live longer.
Drinking could help you live longer—that's the good news for happy-hour enthusiasts from a study presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. According to the study, people who live to 90 or older often drink moderately.
On the other, you might not remember who you are any more.
Heavy drinkers are putting themselves at risk of dementia, according to the largest study of its kind ever conducted.
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(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:35AM (23 children)
From TFAs:
Heavy:
Moderate:
Are preventative health experts always contradicting each other?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:46AM (13 children)
I remember reading two reports that were published within the space of a week a few years ago, in which one recommended a level of alcohol consumption and the other stated that an amount less than the first report recommended would make you an alcoholic.
In this case, it's possible that both reports are correct. Or, perhaps what the studies are showing is correlation, not causation and there is some underlying cause that has not been discovered.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TGV on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:06AM (12 children)
About that first study, the article literally says: "The results do not show causation, only an unexplained link between drinking and longevity."
There is one obvious source of confounding: people who can't drink because of medicine use die earlier. You can really on reach the conclusion that drinking two glasses per day extends life (or any other) if you monitor all subjects closely throughout their life and make sure you have a balanced design, i.e. for every rich, black person from Toronto with an IQ of 103, 1m80, 75kg at age 18, who doesn't sport, studies accountancy, divorces at 41, etc., and drinks one glass of alcohol per day, you need a rich, black person from Toronto with an IQ of 103, 1m80, 75kg at age 18, who doesn't sport, studies accountancy, divorces at 41, etc. who drinks 0 glasses of alcohol per day, and one who drinks 2 glasses per day, etc. Only then can you be sure it's the alcohol, not some other factor.
Since that's totally infeasible, we will keep having contradictory studies until someone finds the biological pathway which explains it.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:20AM (3 children)
Screaming. If one were to look in the direction that the sound was coming from, they would see a man on top of a woman, raping her on the sidewalk. It was a busy day, and countless people witnessed this scene. Then, as this was happening, a cop saw what was happening. "Oh my god!" the officer shouted. The officer then charged in.
The police officer ran past the man raping the woman and up to another man quite a distance away. The officer began shouted at the man for jaywalking, and finally let him off with a warning. As the officer walked past the rapist again, he smiled and said, "Carry on, sir." That's right: The officer was a staunch proponent of men's rights. The man smiled, raised his fist, and slammed it down on the woman's face once again.
A sow vanished from the world that day, and a man became a little happier.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by TGV on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:28AM (2 children)
Ramblings of a deranged mind?
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:33AM (1 child)
He's going to reincarnate as a woman, just you watch. It'll be about as poetic as poetic justice gets.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:38AM
Come on folks, don't feed the troll.
It only encourages him.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:25AM (6 children)
No only that, but it only takes one, just one, 2400 year old Greek philosopher/astronomer to really throw off the averages for mortality.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:31AM (5 children)
How much that Greek drinks, tho?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:40AM
Whether the man was standing up ramrod straight or bent over, his anus was always visible. His anus was always visible, and always leaking liquid fecal matter. For this reason, famished African children would often drink from his anus like it was a water fountain. The possibilities, as you can imagine, were endless.
(Score: 4, Funny) by riT-k0MA on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:03AM (3 children)
Socrates himself was permanently pissed, Plato could stick away... half a crate of whisky every day, and Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Source [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:00PM (2 children)
At no point is a youtube video acceptable as a source. Its far less reliable then wikipedia.
(Score: 2) by riT-k0MA on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:30PM (1 child)
Wooooosh
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:05PM
To be fair, whoever modded that informative was trolling hard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:16AM
I disagree. This phenomenon has been known for a long time [azquotes.com]:
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
(Score: 2) by number11 on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:47AM (1 child)
I don't think so.
The "anti" study used a population that had been hospitalized due to alcohol use. That's probably more alcohol than the average soylentil consumes. And we know that alcohol can be toxic, and massive quantities over time can lead to things like red noses and dementia. The authors say ominous things about smaller quantities of alcohol, but those aren't the subjects that they studied.
Cheers!
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:29AM
With each punch, the man became happier and more free. True Happiness was within his grasp. Just a few more punches. Just a few more! More...! He couldn't be truly happy until the last ounce of life was sapped away from the woman. More! Then, she broke. What the man experienced next was nothing short of True Happiness, and he finally understand the value of men's rights. No, he could see something else, something far more grand. The Tower! It's The Tower! The man could see it by twisting his head sideways. Nothing was impossible for this man any longer.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:55AM
Beat me if I remember... should ask ethanol-fueled.
Now mate, pass that 22nd unit of booze to me, please? It's close to the week's end or someth'hics!'ng and... pardon me... I do plan to live quite long.
And once you lived through enough shit, no memories are best memories, no contradiction here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:14AM (3 children)
I wonder if there is some kind of systematic review and/or meta-analysis of the effects of alcohol consumption. Then perhaps we can have some real idea of what the bulk of the scientific evidence really points to. Google comes up with this study from 2016 [nih.gov] which concludes:
This represents the synthesis of 87 studies representing an aggregate sample of 3,998,626 individuals, so it's a pretty damn big one.
Another, slightly older systematic review and meta-analysis [oup.com] from 2014 states:
(emphases added) I'm a much more inclined to believe these syntheses of many studies than a single study whose about which is said: "The results do not show causation, only an unexplained link between drinking and longevity. More information is needed about how the study was conducted before treating wine as the drink at the fountain of youth."
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday February 22 2018, @07:41AM
Further, the study ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28588063 [nih.gov] )
says the participants were self-reporting their alcohol consumption, so the 14-21 is based on how much they *said* they were drinking, not how much they *actually* drank, before they were found to be.. impaired.
Doctors know people under report
Also, if people drink enough, they *can't remember* how much they drank. http://www.academicwino.com/2015/06/self-reporting-alcohol-consumption-app.html/ [academicwino.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @09:05AM
And this ladies and gentlemen is the only way to draw meaningful conclusions from science. A single study can and will say absolutely anything, even if done with best intentions by capable scientists using proper equipment.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:01PM
Thanks for this. With the caveat that metastudies can also be flawed sometimes (e.g.,in their criteria for selecting which studies to include in the pool, the way data is aggregated) -- and I haven't followed your links to read the details -- this does seem to be the general takeaway.
The general problem with many alcohol studies (as with dietary studies in general) is often that there's a huge number of possible confounding factors, and how they are taken into account can often skew the data toward whatever conclusions researchers like. There are lots of folks who have strong views that alcohol is just bad, and there are plenty more who think a few drinks is just fine. I've seen plenty of rhetoric in press releases dealing with such studies where researchers are interviewed that seem to indicate the researchers have pretty strong personal feelings. I'm not saying it consciously influences conclusions all the time, but it's there. (And not just for alcohol -- I remember reading a study on egg consumption a few years back that seemed to find eggs were going to kill you, and in interviews the lead researcher clearly sounded like a militant vegan.)
Setting confirmation bias aside, there are plenty of confounding factors that could explain the supposed small benefits to moderate alcohol consumption. The main one for longevity studies is that older people who continue to drink regularly are often already healthier, because a lot of drugs and treatments have alcohol interactions, so less healthy older people tend to avoid alcohol. I've seen at least one study that controlled for this and found no health benefit for alcohol consumption (even moderate). The studies on prevention of specific diseases (particularly cardiovascular stuff) may be legit, or there may be other confounding factors at work. Like general anxiety/stress level. Look at the characteristics of the kind of individual who can sit back and have a glass of red wine with dinner most nights vs. someone who can't. Why isn't the latter drinking every night? Do they have a second job or need to do more work in the evenings, or have some other thing that prevents them from having leisurely dinners with a glass of wine? Does anxiety correlate with that, and what might that stress affect?
Or, something else I've definitely seen brought up in some alcohol studies: those with MODERATE consumption -- particularly of the "drink a glass of red wine with dinner every night" variety -- tend to be somewhat wealthier, better educated, often skewed racially and otherwise demographically toward groups who tend to have better health and longevity stats overall. Having a few bottles of wine around all the time is more expensive than most other drinks, so "red wine" studies are naturally going to skew toward the somewhat more affluent.
I swear I remember seeing a study a few years back -- but can't find it now -- which actually looked at people who took up drinking because of the supposed health benefit that studies have been touting for a couple decades. (Well, I believe most were occasional drinkers before, but they deliberately started having the "glass of red wine with dinner" or whatever every night.) If I remember correctly, I saw a study of those folks which not only showed no benefit, but actually showed a much more negative one than the researchers were even expecting.
Bottom line is to follow the parent's metastudy advice: if you're already drinking moderately, there may not be a strong reason to stop completely. But there's likely no strong reason to start either. Yet if you're drinking heavily, that's likely bad.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday February 22 2018, @06:31PM (1 child)
Yes.
And that's for 2 reasons:
1. Studying preventative health is hard. To do it right, you have to do long-term studies where you follow people for decades, and that's longer than any researcher has time for based on the current model of grant funding. Which means they're relying on self-reporting, which is always fraught. Also, they're going to run into sampling problems because they have to find people willing to volunteer for this sort of thing for an extended period of time.
2. Anybody in any food industry has strong incentives to tout studies saying that their product is going to make you live longer or is some kind of "superfood" or similar nonsense, while also touting studies that say that foods that are similar to whatever their product is aren't any good at all. Think spinach vs kale: Kale sellers want you to think kale is super-good for you while spinach sucks, spinach sellers want it the other way around.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 23 2018, @02:38AM
Hey, I believe it. With enough years inside you, booze is like the Dax symbiont -- it might augment some functions, but remove it and the host dies.