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posted by chromas on Saturday August 25 2018, @04:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-news-is-terrible-and-I'm-gonna-need-a-drink dept.

No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms

A large new global study published in the Lancet has confirmed previous research which has shown that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. The researchers admit moderate drinking may protect against heart disease but found that the risk of cancer and other diseases outweighs these protections. A study author said its findings were the most significant to date because of the range of factors considered.

The Global Burden of Disease [open, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31310-2] [DX] study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK, between 1990 and 2016.

Analysing data from 15 to 95-year-olds, the researchers compared people who did not drink at all with those who had one alcoholic drink a day. They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day. For people who had two alcoholic drinks a day, 63 more developed a condition within a year and for those who consumed five drinks every day, there was an increase of 338 people, who developed a health problem.

One of the study authors, Prof Sonia Saxena, a researcher at Imperial College London and a practising GP, said: "One drink a day does represent a small increased risk, but adjust that to the UK population as a whole and it represents a far bigger number, and most people are not drinking just one drink a day."

Related: The Truth We Won't Admit: Drinking is Healthy
Study Shows 3 Drinks a Day May Cause Liver Cancer
Even Moderate Drinking Linked to a Decline in Brain Health
American Society of Clinical Oncology: Alcohol Use Increases Risk of Cancer


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 26 2018, @01:02PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 26 2018, @01:02PM (#726534)

    Its interesting no one has brought up evolution WRT building a rational theoretical model.

    Alcohol is quite poisonous and toxic to cells in high concentration. That's kinda the point; yeast wants to fuck and make more yeast, not become food for bacteria or mold or people or something, so alcohol is somewhat protective.

    It takes some semi-advanced primate brain to intentionally with malice do the organized agriculture thing to generate a modest surplus of produce, do the time-preference thing of waiting to brew instead of eating bread today, then precisely "rot" the stored produce under interesting biochemical conditions to maximize alcohol and minimize the usual products of rot such as mold, botulism, plain old stinky bacterial rot, whatevs.

    So... for all of our evolutionary history, eating rot usually meant you died, or at least were really sick compared to non-rot eating people, so if 5% of the time rotten fruit got you high instead of dead it doesn't matter. So it would not be a huge surprise that your innards have not evolved very well to eating rot aka alcohol.

    There is some evolutionary pressure, if your ancestors came from a brewing culture for zillion years you're much more likely to tolerate alcohol than the opposite, but its more a "generally speaking" kind of thing that on global average humans can't eat rotten food and expect it to turn out well.

    Given this theoretical model that "eating rot usually meant you died, so expecting enhanced liver function to tolerate one delicious type of rot is somewhat over optimistic" then the result of the study seems to match the theoretical model.

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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:27PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Sunday August 26 2018, @06:27PM (#726633)

    Given this theoretical model that "eating rot usually meant you died, so expecting enhanced liver function to tolerate one delicious type of rot is somewhat over optimistic" then the result of the study seems to match the theoretical model.

    But ripe-to-overripe fruit does have a non-zero amount of ethanol in it (Measured up to 8.1% (!!!)). The liver has evolved to take care of it using the alcohol dehydrogenases to convert ethanol and other alcohols into the corresponding aldehydes, and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase to convert acetaldehyde (which is more toxic than ethanol) into the (relatively) harmless acetic acid, the acetate ion being further metabolised to bicarbonate. The alcohol dehydrogenase allows you to eat ripe-to-overripe fruit without succumbing to acute harmful effects.

    This article gives a nice overview: Ethanol, Fruit Ripening, and the Historical Origins of Human Alcoholism in Primate Frugivory [oup.com]