The Mainstream Media and Drinking: How did they agree on this particular lie???

[Mark Rippetoe]

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/heal...healthy-87891/

[OCG]

So... How? What is the causative mechanism at work here?

[stejor]

I'm not up on the current research, but it seems to me that there could be systematic differences between drinkers and abstainers that account for some of this.

Also, this is just one data point, but regular drinking (even 1-2 drinks a night) definitely worsens my sleep and makes all my aches and pains hurt more. I guess it's possible that alcohol is harmful in the short term and helpful in the long term, but they're going to have to show a huge long term benefit for me to accept the short term downsides.

[stef]

How? They're still recovering from the standard human shit behaviour (desire to control others, manipulation, corruption) that was focused on this particular concern worldwide, peaking in the early 1900s. If you want to read something disturbing, try Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

[Mark Rippetoe]

but they're going to have to show a huge long term benefit

Read the article.

So... How? What is the causative mechanism at work here?

The causative mechanism of alcohol's positive contribution to health, or the mechanism by which the media has agreed to omit the effect from their reporting?

[CJ Gotcher]

Interesting article, Rip, and the resultant Googlequest led me here:

http://www.peele.net/lib/glass.html

I find his argument interesting, that our national fetish for abstinence is the result of an unassailable medical paradigm. "Alcoholism is a disease! Those who are predisposed have an allergy and can't moderate their drinking (in for a penny, in for a pound)!" If that's true, regardless of what the evidence says, it would be irresponsible to say that moderate drinking could be healthy because we'll see a huge surge in alcoholics.

If his case is true, the diagnosis of obesity as a 'disease' could have interesting consequences.

[Mark E. Hurling]

The English would never have achieved anything near the empire they did if their troops or the jolly jack tars of the King's Navee (arrrgghh!) had been teetotalers. So three cheers and a tiger for John Barleycorn!

[idlehands]

I've found I have the best training when I am drinking a little at night. Course it might just be the carbs.

And this makes me want to make mead since I just found a source of honey at cost

[stejor]

Read the article.

I did read the article, and I looked at the one graph they included (I didn't look at the sources they linked). To be honest, I'm not sure how to interpret data like 'deaths per 100k people'. Is dropping from a 1.5% death rate to a 1.2% death rate significant in terms of overall life expectancy? It doesn't sound like much benefit to me, but I'm not sure that my intuition is reliable in this instance.

Also, I find it interesting that the dropoff from non-drinker to infrequent drinker is so much larger than the difference between infrequent drinker and the more frequent drinkers. Either the beneficial mechanism of alcohol reaches its point of diminishing returns very quickly, or there's some other factor that's increasing the death rate of non-drinkers.

Lastly, I thought that the idea that moderate drinking was ostensibly healthy was fairly well-known. I think it just doesn't get much traction because it doesn't intuitively seem like something healthy. At least for me, eating healthier foods, sleeping more, exercising, and doing other things that are 'healthy' make me feel better in the short to medium term. Eating shitty food, staying up late, and being a bum makes me feel good in the very short term, but it doesn't take very long for that to catch up with me. My subjective experience of drinking fits much better with the set of unhealthy things than with the healthy things, so my initial reaction is to think that the research is somehow flawed, as so much research is. It's certainly possible that the research is 100% correct, but I understand why people are suspicious of the idea that something that feels unhealthy is somehow beneficial in the long term.

[Mark Rippetoe]

My subjective experience of drinking fits much better with the set of unhealthy things than with the healthy things, so my initial reaction is to think that the research is somehow flawed, as so much research is. It's certainly possible that the research is 100% correct, but I understand why people are suspicious of the idea that something that feels unhealthy is somehow beneficial in the long term.

Lookie here:

Epidemiological study after study (that is, research tracing drinkers, their consumption, and their life outcomes) produces consistent findings—there are now hundreds of such studies.

In 2006, the Archives of Internal Medicine, an American Medical Association journal, published an analysis based on 34 well-designed prospective studies—that is, research which follows subjects for years, even decades. This meta-analysis, incorporating a million subjects, found that “1 to 2 drinks per day for women and 2 to 4 drinks per day for men are inversely associated with total mortality.”

The Research Society on Alcoholism—as its name suggests, not a group predisposed to say good things about alcohol—published a review in 2008 concluding “A considerable body of epidemiology associates moderate alcohol consumption with significantly reduced risks of coronary heart disease and, albeit currently a less robust relationship, cerebrovascular (ischemic) stroke.” It went further, reviewing a range of biological “evidence that moderate alcohol levels can exert direct neuroprotective actions.”

The RSA review also noted: “In over half of nearly 45 reports since the early 1990s, significantly reduced risks of cognitive loss or dementia in moderate, nonbinge consumers of alcohol (wine, beer, liquor) have been observed.”

In the largest prospective study ever conducted for alcohol, involving nearly a half million subjects, sponsored by the American Cancer Society (need I say, an organization not regarded as an alcohol industry stooge), Michael Thun (famed for his anti-smoking investigations) and colleagues examined all causes of death related to drinking among middle-age and elderly subjects.

For all levels of drinking, including the highest one, for both men and women, death rates did not reach those for abstainers.

This is why I asked if you'd read the article.