13 votes

Daily glass of wine is bad for you, World Heart Federation says in new policy

7 comments

  1. [5]
    vektor
    (edited )
    Link
    To summarize what I know about alcohol consumption and health: Being able to consume one drink a day is healthy. Consider for example the restraint of not drinking yourself into a stupor the...
    • Exemplary

    To summarize what I know about alcohol consumption and health: Being able to consume one drink a day is healthy. Consider for example

    • the restraint of not drinking yourself into a stupor
    • the wealth implicit in having access to alcohol
    • the health implicit in not having to be completely dry

    All of which indicate that you're in a generally more healthy position if you drink one drink than if you drink none. Which leads to graphs of life expectancy as a function of alcohol consumption looking like a tick mark (trending down from 0 to 1 daily drinks, and then trending up again from 1 to more drinks) or alternatively being completely flat below 1 drink, depending on methodology. It is unsurprising that someone who, in an alcohol-centric society as ours, completely refrains from drinking, might have adverse health conditions or other factors leading them to that decision.

    However, if you do your science right, (i.e. control for those factors above, e.g. in a RCT), the picture becomes clear that there is no safe amount of alcohol, that the above described graph is a case of correlation =/= causation. There might be different levels of harm as a function of different doses (so your 4th beer a day might hurt you more than the first; or your 7 drinks a week harm you more if you have them all at once), but for all we know, no amount of alcohol is actually safe.

    Just as an aside for how this rumor comes about. Whether the social/.. benefits of drinking outweigh the health disadvantages is your own decision.

    Also funny how one interviewee calls out the alcohol industry's misleading messaging, then later in the article, the alcohol industry tries to "backtrack" (?) and say that the harms shouldn't be exaggerated.

    16 votes
    1. [4]
      teaearlgraycold
      Link Parent
      There must be some amount of alcohol consumption that is inconsequential, though. Maybe in terms of drinks per month or drinks per year. I'd also love to see what risks I'm putting up with. I...

      There must be some amount of alcohol consumption that is inconsequential, though. Maybe in terms of drinks per month or drinks per year. I'd also love to see what risks I'm putting up with. I don't really like alcohol that much in terms of how it feels, but I do enjoy the endless variety of craft beer/whiskey. So I would be happy to take the same approach to alcohol that I do with ice cream - working it into a consumption budget so that I can know the exact results to expect.

      3 votes
      1. [2]
        an_angry_tiger
        Link Parent
        Well it's not part of this article afaict, but in the hacker news discussion on it I did see someone put the estimated decrease in life expectancy as something like 6 months over a lifetime, which...

        Well it's not part of this article afaict, but in the hacker news discussion on it I did see someone put the estimated decrease in life expectancy as something like 6 months over a lifetime, which seems in terms of other things that could harm your health (i.e. smoking, being obese, working in a dangerous industry, crossing the street without looking) is not that high. That also depends on how much you drink and how consistently, which I don't remember, and is the most variable and important yet least reported factor in all of this. If you're drinking a handle of vodka every day, that will probably impact your health way more than a pint a day with dinner every night (which already puts you above the NHS's safety limit).

        The problem I have with these studies is that they don't tend to be clear and upfront about the direct personal impact to your health you get from drinking. I've seen studies that look at overall factors of drinking in terms of risks, which includes things like driving related incidents. I'm not going to drink and drive (I don't even have a car), nor am I wandering around outside when drinking, nor am I that interested in how much other people drinking could impact my life by them crashing a car in to me (because I can't control that). The only thing I really want to know, and what no study seems to be good at presenting (probably because it's hard to measure) is how much drinking 1 single pint at dinner every day for the rest of my life will impact my health, or how much 2 pints, or 3, etc. Every study and report and news item about these always boil down to "drinking is bad for you" or "drinking 1 glass of wine is good for you, everything past that is bad for you", when really the only thing I want to know is how much of it do I have to drink before I should really be concerned about it?

        5 votes
        1. teaearlgraycold
          Link Parent
          My intuition tells me that at or below 2 drinks per week must be negligible. I could absolutely see 1 a day having a measurable effect. That's not based on any studies - it's just what I would...

          My intuition tells me that at or below 2 drinks per week must be negligible. I could absolutely see 1 a day having a measurable effect. That's not based on any studies - it's just what I would personally commit to were I to add regulation of alcohol consumption into my dietary planning.

          2 votes
      2. vektor
        Link Parent
        That's fair. I'm not sure how the risk is structured. I could easily imagine that your marginal risk (i.e. the added risk from one added drink) will wary wildly depending on current intoxication....

        That's fair. I'm not sure how the risk is structured. I could easily imagine that your marginal risk (i.e. the added risk from one added drink) will wary wildly depending on current intoxication. I'm just not sure how big of a gap we're talking about here, and whether e.g. a drink a month vs a drink a day have the same marginal risk.

        2 votes
  2. mycketforvirrad
    Link
    Oh well.

    Any level of drinking can lead to loss of healthy life, the World Heart Federation has said, as it sought to dispel the idea that a daily glass of wine may be good for you.

    Oh well.

    2 votes
  3. lou
    Link
    Archived. I don’t expect anyone to stop drinking because of that, but it would be interesting to know if there's greater harm for non-adults. Some cultures are very relaxed about underage drinking.

    Archived.

    I don’t expect anyone to stop drinking because of that, but it would be interesting to know if there's greater harm for non-adults. Some cultures are very relaxed about underage drinking.

    1 vote