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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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You will have domestic happiness and faithful friends.
(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.