This is just silly. Every single thing they list can be caused by something other than alcohol except for fetal alcohol syndrome. From from the “root.”
By that logic, is it silly to say that the root issue of someone’s heart stopping was the bullet that passed through it, because a knife through the heart was the root issue that caused someone else’s heart to stop?
There’s different ways to get dementia. Alcohol consumption is the root cause of one of them, as well as 61 other diseases. If you get dementia and they run tests, they might find that the root cause of your dementia is alcohol consumption. They might find it’s a different toxic substance you were exposed to, or they might find it was genetic. That’s the root cause of your dementia. The study and article obviously aren’t saying that alcohol is the root cause of everyone’s dementia, or the 61 other diseases it causes.
It is saying that someone who wouldn’t have otherwise dealt with dementia or 61 other diseases could get them purely due to alcohol consumption, making it the root cause of their disease.
« Could » is the word. It literally means: we don’t know. It stays an assumption.
BTW, was Paracelsus considered in the study?
If you get a disease that you wouldn’t have gotten had you not consumed alcohol, then the alcohol consumption is the root cause of your disease. The study found 61 diseases for which this is the case for different people
As I said, the root cause of many people’s heart stopping has been a bullet passing through it - those people’s hearts wouldn’t have otherwise developed massive holes and would have gone on ticking had it not been for the bullet - but that doesn’t mean that bullets piercing hearts is the exclusive reason that hearts stop.
I’m not sure if the point you’re trying to make is that not everyone who consumes alcohol gets these diseases or that alcohol consumption isn’t the only cause of these diseases. Both of those statements are correct but neither is what the study concluded.
You cannot compare a bullet passing through a heart - an entirely physical process - with diseases from cancer - complex biochemical processes. This is statistically and logically wrong - like comparing apples and oranges, although your example is even more wrong. Apples and oranges are at least fruits, but heart and cancer?
The entire field of ontology is complex in itself. I agree that alcohol CAN (!) increase the chance to get cancer, but - again - Paracelsus plays an imminent role, which is even not considered! Also possible interactions with all the other environmental, psychological etc variables are missing. This diminishes considerably the value of this study.
If I have time and the motivation, I could dig deeper into the design. But it seems to have remarkable flaws and thus makes it in the context of medicine and science a pub, which should be considered with caution!
You cannot compare a bullet passing through a heart - an entirely physical process - with diseases from cancer - complex biochemical processes.
I can’t compare causes of death with different root causes because of different mechanisms of malady? It’s done all the time and I just did it successfully. You don’t like it because it disproves your (still unknown) argument concluding in the “diminished value of the study” which you never read, as evidenced by you asking if they considered Paracelsus.
Occam’s Razor would suggest that when the highly knowledgeable and trained people performing the study, in conjunction with all the people (at least in this thread) who seem to similarly understand what “root cause” means vs the 1 person who doubles down but hasn’t read the study, that you are the issue and not everyone else. And this is “statistically and logically” the case. And honestly, your psuedo-scientific half-understanding zeal and intensity just come off as a drinker who refuses to accept that their actions might result in 61 known diseases that they wouldn’t otherwise encounter if they choose not to drink.
You’re obviously intent on continuing to double down on what amounts to your own personal definition of what “root cause” means as you’ve refused to address what the study authors and everyone else in this thread seen to understand clearly - that getting a disease that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten had you not been a drinker means that drinking is the root cause of that disease for you. When you get one of these diseases, be sure to argue with your doctor that drinking definitely was NOT the root cause as you have rejected the title of a post on Lemmy that asserts the opposite. Use the word Paraclesus a bunch too.
I think you blew the lid right off this thing, champion
The more you write about science, statistics, and causality, the more obvious it becomes that your confidence is doing the heavy lifting where methodological understanding should be.
It has to be discouraging for you to know that you don’t know what you’re talking about while continuing to double down, to know that you didn’t read the study and that you’re responding to a post title with a gut feeling, to know that all of your “arguments” amount to, “nuh uh, you’re illogical and wrong so I won’t even try to make a single reasoned point” while being completely unwilling and unable to address actual points because you can’t, to know that the likelihood that your gut feeling is actually correct despite the conclusion of a robust study is pretty tiny, and to know that it all played out in a public forum.
I know that last part is ironically what drives you to be rude and condescending when it only hurts your credibility as a thoughtful person. Your fragile ego was challenged and you got mad and attacked the person instead of the idea, hoping no one noticed that saying, “oh man, you don’t know anything” would move the spotlight off of you, who happens to carry all the burden to prove that the study is “silly,” as you put it. And you know that’s true, too, and I bet its transparency doesn’t help that ego of yours.
I’m doomed. I got a new GP last month. I told her (in front of my partner) that I don’t believe we have a future and I’m going to enjoy the time I’ve got, not make changes I don’t want to make. She didn’t like it, but I think she appreciated that I wasn’t full of bs.
Yep, it sucks. But it turns out there’s a non-stop drip of terrible fucking news, the planet continues to get hotter with more wildfires every year, my well-paying career in software might be soon over due to the advent of AI coding, I’m working for the worst company I have ever worked for and with one of the worst bosses I’ve ever seen, the president is getting shows critical of him cancelled in order to approve sales of all major media platforms to his fascist friends (and fail sons), the cost of everything is skyrocketing, social security looks likely to collapse before I can ever collect it, and there does not appear to be any relief in sight for any of this.
Maybe I don’t need to go old and healthy at 80+.
It’s obvious that drinking isn’t good for you, but it was just as obvious that smoking isn’t good for you and that didn’t keep my grandparents from doing it until it killed them — and nicotine barely gives you any buzz at all. We all gotta go some time.
consider it this way: getting old may suck. getting old, sick and having strokes sucks way more and just makes you miserable and a burden to a bunch of people who didnt deserve it. you wont be taking it out your enemy. just hurting yourself and finding more reasons to hate yourself.
We have locked everything anyone needs to live a decent life behind a massive paywall, make a habit of eliminating any way besides debt to make it over the massive paywall, and then scientists do research on people’s coping mechanisms so that others can use that as a way to feel righteous condemning a stranger’s habits.
Notice how you didn’t spend a moment discussing where relief for any of the very real problems I mentioned is coming from because you likely know it isn’t.
Nope. And that’s not why I didn’t discuss it.
There are things you are definitely responsible to yourself for. Such as you’re decisions of what you are doing to you’re own body with what you are cognitively aware of consuming. Such as smoking or too much alcohol or food.
You’re just talking about all things that seem impossible to control just to get the focus off yourself.
That’s how an addict would speak. That’s an old addict trick.
Nah, I wrote that and this sober dude, just as I spend the vast majority of my waking time.
The point is that these very real problems have no solutions but somehow the only thing we can do in these threads is handwring and concern troll people coping with them.
There is lots of online encouragement to live a long, sober life in an unaffordable, polluted hellscape.
I’m not attached to a bottle, but having a beer at the end of a long day provides a lot more relief than podcast bro pseudoscientific bullshit about meditation and wellness which is the only alternative on offer. (Because we live in a country where everything is purposely broken and the only way sold to fix it is for each of us individually to be perfect.)
On the other hand, why do you think we gave up the hunter/gatherer life style?
Cultivating grapes for wine and grain for beer was the origin of civilization!
So you’re telling me without alcohol I could have spent my life picking berries before I died of a toothache at 25? And instead I’m reading excel sheets and will die a prolonged death after years of chemo at 85?
Damn alcohol really is the cause of all my problems…
No one is forcing you to brush your teeth.
True, but its illegal for me to wander my neighborhood and pick berries from “private property”
Realistically, if you eat out of trash cans you’ll have the same experience, and if you’re quiet and neat, no one will report you.
Found the racoon
We prefer “opportunistic omnivore” but yes
The “dying at 25” thing is the result of a common misrepresentation of data. Infant mortality rates were significantly higher in the past, so the average gets thrown off. But, if you remove those data points (to reflect post-infancy mortality), you’d be living roughly the same amount of time.
Back when life expectancy was 45.
Popular misconception.
There were a lot of people who never made it out of childhood, which skews the average down.
But if you made it to adulthood, you had a pretty good chance of making it to 65 or so.
That’s how averages work. Math.
That’s also why averages aren’t a good measure of a lot of things and are misleading.
With one important difference: Wine was often diluted back then and beer was not as strong as it is today, so it was much less dangerous on the whole, and it was so weak that even children drank it instead of the terrible water of the time. Though they also drank water when it was good.
Less strong, but since they drank beer instead of water overall consumption was higher. Lots of people should still drink less though.
Yeah! It was seen as an everyday good feeling healthy thing back then and not just something to get wasted on, though that happened a lot too. I’d take the ancient mindset of moderation over today’s alcohol addicted society anyday.
Not sure it was so much about good feeling. From what I read it was more about booze being less likely to grant you a plague debuff than water back in the days.
It’s almost certainly both. It’s not like alcohol is the only drug humans have used. Most do not have that justification, yet they’re still used.
I hate that alcohol, such an obvious health detriment, is so ingrained in culture that people don’t even question it… Your link makes it worse!
I hate that existence, such an obvious health detriment, is so ingrained in culture that people don’t even question it…
Like the link points out, we were drinking before we had written language.
It’s a matter of dealing with life on life’s terms. The reality is that people like drinking. Sometimes people drink too much, and a few unlucky folks can’t drink anything without risking death.
I ocne read a story about a Vietnam era war correspondent. He was a pacifist before going to cover combat and seeing combat up close made him hate war even more.
At one point a publisher asks him to contribute an article that ‘deglamorizes war.’
He wrote back that deglamorizing war would be as easy as deglamorizing sex.
Let’s fire up a peace pipe with tobacco then!
/j
A ha ha ha Cheech & Chong?! That’s an old memory 😁😁😁 loved it, but I don’t even dare thinking how badly it could have aged 😬😁
Cool, let’s. /nj
Thankfully we haven’t progressed since then!
Good thing someone else did the work long ago, so I don’t need to keep drinking it.
The oldest recipe we have found was a recipe for beer.
That analysis statistically was terrible and the title is disingenuous and misrepresents the data set.
Welp. cracks open another one
Had to do a double take with that image, the last time I saw it was in the instructions for how to use a menstrual cup. 😳
Left: wine glass with broken off foot.
Right: chess piece reveal party.
A cup? I usually just drink straight from the bottle
Damn, glad I quit drinking.
(Hits vape pen.)
(/s, just in case it wasn’t clear.)
Glad I quit drinking and am currently quitting the vape pens.
Right on, it took some doing but I’m glad I quit nicotine. It’s worth it!
cause
attributable
What now?
Yup, cause implies mechanism, of which there is very little here, seems a lot more like correlation. Also, it’s Harvard
nutritionpublic health, which is, problematic.
Older males in my family were all diabetic by my age. The main difference between us? I don’t drink wine with my meals. Idk if that’s a coincidence, but it makes me wonder.
But, “Everything in moderation.”, and “The dose makes the poison.”
Go ahead and counter with this ancient “wisdom”, then continue to drink. It’s your body, you don’t need to justify how you abuse it to anyone.
You’re not wrong. From the study:
Most fully alcohol-attributable diseases require heavy drinking, either occasionally (e.g. alcohol poisoning) or chronically (most chronic disease categories linked to alcohol).
The way I read it, the commenter does not believe moderation prevents harm. Hence the “wisdom” in quotes. But they’re for the freedom to self-“abuse.”
I am still waiting for someone to refudate this analysis. So far, I have yet to see one even close. It’s one of the best I have seen.
https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2007.04.089
The most important statistic mentioned is light drinkers have a reduction in all-cause mortality compared to non-drinkers. While heavy drinkers or binge drinkers have an increase.
It’s a critical statistic that all of these sensationalist headlines fail to account for or even analyze.
IIRC that effect is more a result of bad categorization rather than light alcohol use actually being correlated with lower mortality.
People who used to be heavy drinkers and who have since quit get put in the “non drinkere” category, but because they used to drink heavily their mortality is still impacted even after they stop. You don’t suddenly get a good liver after 10 years of tearing it apart after all.
So the “non-drinkers” category has an artificially worse mortality than the light drinkers.
At the end of the day the body breaks alcohol down into some carcinogens. No amount of that is good for you.
It’s a decent argument but it’s not supported in the data.
Now I am going to have to dig up that study from China. They had a sample size of over 1 million people with repeated blood draws, medical history and a full alcohol use history. It showed the same all-mortality curve for non-drinkers (never consumed) versus light drinkers.
What’s interesting is heavy drinkers who quit reverted back close to the never consumed level after like 5 years.
I swear I had it saved to my zotero account but I can’t find it. I will keep looking.
Bottom line: ethanol under the right dosage reduces cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The amount of reduction more than compensates for its risks of creating other diseases like cancer. However the negative effects of over-consumption make it unethical for any medical professional to recommend non-drinkers to start drinking. If you choose to drink, 1-2 drinks per day depending on sex and weight is the hard limit.
2 drinks a day is a heavy drinker.
The blood thinning effect of alcohol has been dismissed by several studies, it’s a cause of many types of heart disease. The problem is people lie about intake, and the teetotlers and typically ex alcoholics.
Ethanol is a toxin, it effects mitochondrial efficiency at incredibly low levels. Huge risk factor for dementia.
Also be careful of regional studies like the large Chinese cohort because a lot of effects are due to genetics. Bad epidemiology had people convinced fish oil would would prevent heart disease because of one study in inuit that failed to consider genetics.
There is no safe amount of alcohol.
Speaking of terrible studies. The one you linked is absolutely terrible.
Have you read of the actual paper. Their conclusions are absolutely not supported by the evidence and their methodology is statistically invalid.
Heavy drinkers is not what you think it is. The effect of “light” drinkers is due to poor sampling effect of non drinkers, who are both rare and often have other health issues. Repeated studies show no amount of intake is beneficial.
I think that’s not because of alcohol - I am a light drinker (3 a week, or less) now and it’s because my life is better and I am healthier and not as stressed or poor. I can drink not daily because I’m not an addictive sort of person. Yeah my health is better now than the years I didn’t drink but it’s because I have more money, can get medical care, have time to exercise too, all the benefits of the easier lifestyle we finally reached.
I don’t think it’s so harmful, nor helpful, always take July & December as dry months and see no difference in how I feel.
I know that’s anecdotal, but unless they are controlling for income and overall lifestyle, my guess is that light drinking is an indication of a healthy moderate sort of lifestyle not an actual healthy factor in one.
The important thing is that you found a way to feel superior.
that’s just it, they always meddle with what you do with your own body.
The same way bible thumpers just can’t be satisfied with how others live their lives
Send this to Doug Ford, who has an agenda to keep everyone drunk, while he does not drink.
Well, I was thinking of dropping alcohol anyways.
Did it on New year’s eve. I’m enjoying it so far…
Social life changes a lot. Luckily I didn’t have one to begin with.
I’ve found 0% beer is good for having a drink in your hand during a social event. They’re not really that good in and of themselves that you can drink them to appreciate them like a real beer, and of course they don’t get you drunk at all. But it’s better than having water or nothing.
Gotta go sometime and I’d rather do it having enjoyed a little bit of wine
Yeah if it’s going allow me to relax enough to have a good time on the weekends then it is what it is. No point in living anyway if I’m not able to have a good time.
Slow motion suicide.
