Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol

Ethanol is metabolized to acetaldehyde. Aldehydes form crosslinks between proteins and DNA (and DNA with itself). Inactivation of the aldehyde-metabolizing ALDH2 enzyme (which happens in 50% of East Asians) increases risk for various disorders including cancer and late-onset Alzheimer's.

Cancers linked to alcohol use:

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-...

The American Cancer Society recommends avoiding alcohol consumption at any level.

Here’s one of the fundamental problems with studying human diet and psychology, from the article:

> The best way to assess the effects of alcohol would be to randomly assign people to drink it or not in childhood and then monitor their health and drinking over the rest of their lives. Since such studies cannot be done, researchers instead have to ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over much shorter periods of time.

Studying humans properly is nigh-on impossible.

I'm amazed that this is still an ongoing discussion. All of these "studies" have been distracting with muddied data from a very simple, unambiguous scientific fact: alcohol is a poison. By its immediate biological effects, it literally is a poison. And you shouldn't drink poison.

Decades of studies rationalizing that "actually, people who drink two glasses of wine a day live longer" and their ilk, have only ever distracted from this simple truth, obviously so hard to contradict by first principles.

Given the immense benefits that some amount of social drinking can confer on an individual, this really doesn't pass the pub test. Reading the article increases the impression further. If drinking less than 11 times a year is not good enough to meet the author's bar, then whatever absolutely miniscule population of people who've literally never had a drink in their entire life there is are going to be subject to so many confounding variables that they'll be worse than useless, there is simply not a big enough sample size of people who otherwise lead completely "normal" lives, and yet literally never touch alcohol, it's absurd.

At the army, I remember a doctor insisting on a very precise answer to the question if I was drinking alcohol "never" or "rarely".

for coffee it's probably very similar

we say "the dose makes the poison" but it doesn't change that regularly drinking a low dose of poison is not good.

I used to drink alcohol to self-medicate my social anxiety. I realized eventually, however, that, because it also lowered my inhibitions, I would do and say things I wouldn't have were I not inebriated. This is what effectively convinced me to give up the drink, as it were.

This has popped up a lot this week. There are at least mental benefits to participating in group activities, some of which include alcohol, and of those that do the vast majority end peacefully with a fruitful, long, and happy life - devoid of any aliments listed. Human makeup is so much more complicated than saying alcohol has no health benefits.

Have there been studies of nominally non-drinking sub-populations, such as Mormons or Muslims, to understand the effects of alcohol?

This NS piece is complete misinformation. This below is by a writer who has been writing about this sort of thing for years.

"Tim Stockwell has been up to his old tricks. In a study that was widely publicised this week despite being published in January, he claims - yet again - that moderate drinking does not confer health benefits. The study is largely a rehash of his meta-analysis from last year (which I wrote about here) so there isn’t much more to say except to note the extraordinary amount of cherry-picking that is required to come to such a conclusion.

He and his team started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which they added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. They then discarded 103 of these because they didn’t meet Stockwell’s increasingly stringent and somewhat arbitrary criteria. This left 107 studies, but there was still work to do.

In the new study, he introduces yet another filter for “quality” and reduces the number of studies down from 21 to 18 and then 15, but these still show lower risk for moderate drinkers, so he introduces some more criteria until a vast literature built up over 50 years is whittled down to just six studies. This gets rid of the apparent benefits of moderate drinking. He then removes one more study and, voila!, moderate drinkers are now at greater risk than teetotallers."

https://snowdon.substack.com/p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-o...

It’s good to know that I’m enjoying my vice but not overly so, usually a few beers over the weekend. I think the relaxation and decrease in stress might offset the chemical damage. I’m sticking with moderation I think. My rules are simple “no alcohol during the week, a little bit on the weekend”. I’ve been doing that since college, which was a bit back.

No surprise. Just about everything equating activities to life expectancy has the confounder of whether one can do the activity. Hadn't thought about it with alcohol but it makes perfect sense.

I also strongly suspect that a bit overweight being the best is the same thing at work.

Chris Masterjohn's analysis of the topic is a better look of the data available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4QzEelRGvA

They never include the mental benefits of alcohol. A night out drinking with friends or coworkers has mental health benefits that last, sometimes a lifetime.

In the 90s I remember the '1 or 2 glasses of wine a day is good for you' message was common knowledge but now appears to be propoganda. I always that it was strange at the time and nowadays that myth has been thoroughly debunked. I am no longer a partaker but I wonder what is unique about alcohol that triggers people to come out of the woodwork with whataboutism and messenger attacks to defend its' usage? In this thread we see examples of people in denial and with unhealthy dependent relationships with it. Or perhaps they work in the industry.

drinking fermented food is healthy, including beer

I wonder if these poorly-conducted studies are properly reporting any sources of funding an conflict of interest, as well as how they get past peer-review if they have relatively basic methodological flaws.

Not a drinker. As a person who makes their living using their brain, it's never made sense to me to not protect an important asset. Over the years, most of my peers have stopped being able to do any sort of intensive brain work because of (a) drinking, (b) sugar, or (c) smoking or some other drug. Over the years, the decline in ability due to these things is obvious. I regularly outperform people 20 years younger than me because of poor lifestyle choices they're already making.

Society wise, alcohol is the the direct cause, or a major factor in heart disease, cancer, suicide, gun deaths, car deaths and injuries, etc.