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.
interesting! acetaldehyde is liebig's original gangster aldehyde, before even formaldehyde. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde also says, 'acetaldehyde occurs naturally in coffee, bread, and ripe fruit, and is produced by plants.'
can you use acetaldehyde to crosslink proteins and polysaccharides to make thermosetting bioplastics? apparently you can use it to crosslink urea, just as you can with formaldehyde
there isn't enough acetaldehyde in bread and fresh fruit or alcoholics' livers to be a practical source for this purpose, but one traditional acetaldehyde process was catalytic dehydrogenation of ethanol on a copper-based catalyst at 260°–290°, which seems like the kind of thing that john plant might feature on the next episode of primitive technology
This is nonsense advice. Would you take the advice of someone who recommended never driving because any level of driving risks death? That's obviously stupid. Or it should be anyway though I suspect some pendants will try to argue it. If you're one of those people what about never going outside? The sun's deadly rays might give you cancer and there's no safe level of sunlight!!
Risks are about trade-offs. If the American Cancer Society wants to be helpful and actually listened to they need to provide practical actionable advice, not this cop-out.
The belief that moderate consumption alcohol isn't just harmless, but in fact beneficial to your health, is extremely widespread in my personal experience. It's past time to change that if the science disagrees.
And you're right, risks are all about trade-offs and how you implement that advice into your own life is entirely up to you. Crucially, they're not making recommendations to make anyone feel better about their harmful decisions, they're making them to help people make informed decisions.
Alcohol can have large benefits for helping people to bond and socialize. The article itself pointed this out. Of course people can socialize without alcohol. But I think it's plausible to argue that alcohol in moderation can improve and deepen the experience.
>Also if I go drinking with someone I don't know well, the risk of their becoming violent is quite high
In what kind of society or social circles is this true? Here it's common to socialize and meet strangers over a drink or two, and the risks of their becoming violent is near zero.
Many drugs promote socialization. To the point that you have to question the distinction between drugs and food/drink. Take sugar. It's often the focus of social gatherings. But the bad effects of sugar arguably outweigh those of alcohol, given the epidemics of diabetes and obesity.
Alcohol happens to have 10,000 years of cultural tradition behind it. Plus, it pairs well with food.
Pick a random person at a random moment in time. What is the probability that the person is under the influence of alcohol? No more than 3% is my guess, but some of my debate opponents might disagree, so let's appease them and say 6%. Keeping on randomly choosing (person, time) pairs, taking note of whether the person you pick is engaging in any violence. Ignore any violence done by anyone other then the person you randomly picked. 40% of the violence you note occurs during the 6% of the time the person you picked is under the influence of alcohol.
Like someone here writes, correlation does not imply causation, but correlation is evidence of causation, and that is a strong correlation. Specifically, if the person you picked is under the influence, he or she is 10.4 times more likely to be engaging in an act of violence than if he or she is not.
>Do you want a source for my assertion that there are benefits to getting from where you are to where you want to be using cars?
Have those made-up sources included externalities, from air and noise pollution, to city planning, commutes, lifestyle changes - include pressure and stress added to the individual by the extra speed of going places?
Have they asked those pesky "walk and/or take the public transport" Europeans living in suitable cities, if they prefer their way?
I wish they would be more clear about how bad drinking is otherwise everyone tends to see it the same.
A friend of mine wouldn’t eat non-organic blueberries because he heard they suck up tons of pesticides so ate more eggs and sausage instead for breakfast.
Is the magnitude of health benefit of going from 2 drinks a day to 1 drink a day equivalent to or 1/20th the benefit of an average American walking an additional 20 minutes per day?
I don’t have the source with me now but I read that in my example above, it would save about 650 lives a year compared to 175k+ due to overall alcohol use.
> Risks are about trade-offs. If the American Cancer Society wants to be helpful and actually listened to they need to provide practical actionable advice, not this cop-out.
I feel like the medical community is slowly starting to finally realize that they can't force patients to minmax their lives. Why would I live a long life that isn't enjoyable?
I think we learned in 2020-2021 that if the medical community doesn't put out an extremely strong statement about something, the general public won't take it seriously at all.
When the ACS recommends avoiding alcohol consumption at any level, they don't think people are actually going to suddenly quit drinking. They're just trying to convince that guy who drinks two six-packs a night to cut down to one six-pack a night.
No cigarettes either. But it's OK to go camping and live in a cloud of smoke for days. I wonder how many cigarettes a day equals being in a big campground with fires everywhere for 2 days is?
What about an AQI of ~1500? Yeah, we lived through that here 4 years ago during the fires here in Oregon, while waiting to find out if we’d told to evac.
Presumably the risk with cigarettes is addiction, whereas that is less of an issue with alcohol because alcohol is significantly less addictive than nicotine.
Alcohol is more addictive than nicotine. The "advantage" of nicotine is that it creates a physical dependence more readily at smaller doses, but alcohol is psychologically pervasive. To the point where entire cultures have gone to war over it throughout history.
Roasted coffee has variable amounts of acetaldehyde, but typically in the tens of ppm. So, coffee will present orders of magnitude lower acetaldehyde exposure than drinking even dilute alcoholic beverages.
I wonder more about soluble fiber carbohydrates leading to ethanol production in the gut.
Interesting. Well, I was not too invested in that theory, haha.
It also could be the ritual of the whole thing. I quit drinking, and got really into coffee drinks. Creating potions—the anticipation, the combination of fluids with different densities and colors, the foam that is produced by espresso when the pressure is just right—it is all kind of satisfying.
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.
Frustratingly, we came very close to getting a study that should have come pretty close to giving a conclusive answer to this. It was funded and approved and started. But then it was cancelled after people found out that the lead researcher lied about his ties to the alcohol industry: https://dynomight.net/alcohol-trial/
The other being the myriad of influencing factors you can never really isolate.
Say you do the setup from the quote, then one group would also be in a special situation where researchers told them to do this thing, and they would tell their friends, or maybe they would keep it secret, or maybe it would make them a bit weird, or maybe it would pave the way for more addictions, or make them more conscious of it, and they would have another item on their usual shopping list, and they may meet their spouse in a bar, and so on — all of which influences outcome.
Not to mention that humans are very different including their metabolic physiology. It's very hard to predict what level of drinking will cause systemic issues for any given individual. That said, I'm inclined to believe the studies saying that there is no health benefit to any level of drinking.
It will get much easier in the future when the likes of Meta collect and publish personal data down to the level of drinks choice. Researchers can then simply ask their institution to apply for a Meta-science subscription, pay for access to Meta-API to extract the data, hire a Meta-integration consultant to get it into a usable format, upgrade to Meta-science-plus in order to cross-reference Meta-pref with Meta-health, scramble to perform data analysis with the remaining two weeks active period, discover that there's a fatal bug in Meta-API because it was rushed to release by an ambitious product manager, wait two years for a bug-fix, and start over.
I hope someday we could develop computers that can do a molecularly accurate simulation of the human body. Then we could try all the inputs we can imagine, with a bunch of different sets of genes, and figure out exactly what's good or not.
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.
It's not quite so black and white, since poisons are generally defined in conjunction with their dose. Eg "The dose makes the poison".
With alcohol, we don't really have a dose, like we do with eg vitamin A, which is toxic beyond a certain level. And as the article states, there are social benefits with drinking alcohol which could, if the dose of alcohol is low enough, offset the cost-benefit analysis of drinking.
> But he points out that it doesn’t consider the social aspects of moderate drinking. “It is healthier to socialise without the need for alcohol, but the benefits of spending time with others is still likely to be greater than the risk from the consumption of one to two units of alcohol,” he says. “The challenge being perhaps limiting alcohol intake in this way.”
While the conclusion looks like a good general guideline, the logic is flawed. There are things that are beneficial (or even necessary) in appropriate amount that are bad in larger dosage: resistance training, cardio, sauna, sulforaphane, food in general, fasting, even water..
I figured this was a religious thing. I have spoke to a lot of Christians who were big on health and abstained from all kinds of things, but insisted that alcohol was healthy in small amounts, specifically a bit of red wine every other day or something. Took me longer than it should have to realise this was due to not wanting to acknowledge thst something cultural or promoted by Jesus/the church could be objectively bad.
FWIW, prosciutto and other cured meats are also carcinogenic. So is barbecue. Lots of things that we ingest are poison. I’m not sure why alcohol should be singled out here.
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.
> we say "the dose makes the poison" but it doesn't change that regularly drinking a low dose of poison is not good.
I'm not sure that's the right conclusion there. Vitamin A is a poison, because it's toxic in high doses. But that doesn't mean you should avoid vitamin A.
The expression means that a poison cannot be defined independently of its dose. You need to know the chemical and the amount.
Yes, that was my point exactly. Due to nice weather, ice cream consumption and drowning begin to correlate and it's hard to draw conclusions from this correlation alone.
As an example for coffee consumption it could just be that coffee is consumed more in countries with higher living standards and higher living standards lead to longer life. Coffee might not necessarily be healthy by itself, though of course it could very well be.
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.
But isn't social anxiety a source of many harmful inhibitions? To me moderate lowering of inhibitions is a good thing, and a couple of beers helps with that. But with anything more the bad effects outweigh the good.
Still, facing one's fears and going sober to anxiety inducing situations is absolutely much better long-term treatment of social anxiety. That has a lasting effect, alcohol doesn't.
> I would do and say things I wouldn't have were I not inebriated
Although I mean, isn't that the point? If your social anxiety was inhibiting you from eg going to a social event, asking someone out, or speaking in front of a lot of people, wouldn't alcohol reducing your inhibitions be a good thing?
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.
I imagine picking people from one particular religion or culture is bound to introduce statistical skews.
Mormons do seem to skew toward abstinence from a lot of unhealthy habits, but the stereotype is that they drink a lot of soda, right? That’s bound to do something.
Plus if a group has a strong stigma against alcohol you’ll probably get some members with an unusually high incentive to miss-report whether or not they drink.
> you’ll probably get some members with an unusually high incentive to miss-report whether or not they drink
As a former member of such a group, this is exactly right. Even if it's completely anonymous, there's a strong and absurd sense of "God is watching me fill out this form, better make myself look good".
It's a fair question. However, even muslims are human, i.e., when I've worked in strictly muslim countries (or for that matter, alcohol free geographical zones) someone, somewhere, is drinking (or they know someone that can get it, it being throat and brain cell destroying hooch) even though they're also ticking the zero booze box. See how complicated humans are? But isn't a zero alcohol life not a viable position even for teetotallers of yore, fermented fruit, some food, all contained alcohol.
The increase in alcohol usage in a population increases the onset of symptoms of various alcohol related health effects, including alcoholism and death.
It’s pretty well understood, clinically speaking.
But it’s fun to down a few and the statisical chances of dying sooner are not that high if you follow the generally recommended limits.
Yes, but those populations are far from completely dry. They may drink less, but do not represent a scientific control group. If you did find a totally dry community, the other cultural differances may well muddy the results too (diet, relationship to medical care etc).
Do you have support for that claim? Large, large parts of the Islamic world are not westernized at all — I would be very surprised if rural Yemeni housewives or Socotran shepherds ever drink, or for that matter 99% of people in pre-tourist-visa Saudi.
Hard agree on their being a myriad of confounding factors from genetics over climate and family relationships to diet, though...
Well, i have family connections to pre-visa middle eastern countries and yes, alcohol is a problem. Thats why they have the rule. Are drugs also not a problem also in many countries despite national bans? Remember too that about 30% of people in western nations are essentially dry (<2 drinks per year). So the asking questions approach has merit.
Interesting! Didn't expect that. Also useful statistic with the 30%, makes sense I guess.
Getting off-topic at this point I guess, but I think national bans can go both ways (and everything in between). I suppose (alcohol) Prohibition and the War on Drugs in the US are prominent examples, but I don't think such bans are doomed to fail necessarily — especially if they are tied with genuine cultural or religious beliefs, geographic isolation, pragmatic unavailability or the thing being banned being simple "not in fashion",,
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."
>In his comments to the Guardian he more or less admits that he is only doing this because the benefits of alcohol consumption are inconvenient to people like him who want to regulate booze like tobacco...
>>“The idea [alcohol has benefits] has impacted national drinking guidelines, estimates of alcohol’s burden of disease worldwide and has been an impediment to effective policymaking on alcohol and public health,” he added.
That doesn't sound like he's "admitting to" what your linked article says he's admitting to.
Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, trying to debunk this Stockwell guy's work, only to make oneself look unreliable with such claims.
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.
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.
I do think this is true, but if you include those times you'd also have to include the nights where it ruined friendships (or a host of other negative consequences). It would be an impossible study to execute, but I do wonder on-balance across long time periods and large populations what the overall net affect of alchohol is on mental health.
In your experience, is the alcohol required to enjoy the night out?
I've personally had nights out with and without alcohol that were just as much fun. I'm also very much a homebody though, so I'm not a great sample to really say either way.
It’s not required, but so much of socializing and the existence of various “third places” hinges on alcohol that the choice is “do something social centered on drinking” or “do nothing”. You can’t expect people to single handedly overturn the social systems that have intertwined alcohol and socialization (especially for men)
There really isn’t much you can’t do sober that you think you need to be drinking for. Even dancing, jamming out, hanging out at a bar with friends are all possible and TBH more enjoyable once you get past the early phase where you anticipate it feeling awkward.
I think we are in a phase of overturning even more ingrained social systems, so not drinking a certain thing isn't a huge deal, especially with a growing Muslim population in the west, the growing interest in health and fitness culture, and in my country, the absolute state of the city on a weekend.
I think that may be a moot point if you move from an individual level to a societal level.
Like, the positive effects that their success in baseball has on the Dominican Republic would likely also be there if they would commit that hard to basketball, or chess (and maybe that would come with less knee injuries). Yet, it's still correct to say that baseball is hugely beneficial to the DomRep.
My larger point being that we have to disentangle "what should you do on your evenings" and "what is a good cultural approach to this issue"
> My larger point being that we have to disentangle "what should you do on your evenings" and "what is a good cultural approach to this issue"
Those are actually one in the same for me, or at least two parts of the same answer. People should spend their evenings however they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.
I'd be very concerned with any cultural approach to changing behavior, basically "Nudge" with a different name. Culture should be the byproduct of the collective people, a retrospective understanding of what the people already are. Culture shouldn't be a tool for manipulation in my opinion.
I'm not sure about required, but depending where you live most of the stuff that's open at night is drinking-related ie. bars, pubs and clubs. A table full of people in a busy bar only ordering Coke or water is going to be kicked out pretty quickly.
If I wanted to go out at night in my city, and go somewhere that wasn't centered around booze I'd be going home around 8 or 9PM since nothing PG-13 is open late.
I agree with you. It comes down to risks vs benefits, and I feel that for a huge number of people that aren't predisposed to addiction, that don't need to drink to the point of blacking out, etc., it may very well be worth it.
I know that my "principled" refusal to drink in my younger years made socializing a lot harder and just generally put a barrier between myself and my peers. Of course, a stronger person could overcome those challenges without alcohol, but that seems like a Herculean task for someone who's already shy and lacking self-esteem.
I have cherished memories of boozing out with friends but I would not link this to ”mental health” benefits given the documented onset mental health issues including depression and alcoholism is directly linked to alcohol consumption.
Drinking occasionally can be ’fun’ and it can have social benefits but in large scale studies of populations increase in alcohol usage don’t show ”mental health benefits”.
I would state ’studies have not found quantifiable benefits of alchol use’ and that can still coexist with claims that the benefits of alcohol to yourself are not quantifiable - which is sort of fair, many aspects of human life are beyond reach of clear metrics.
The adverse effects, however, are quite quantitifiable by healthcare statistics. While outcomes vary in different populations, the outcomes are never positive (per current resarch).
”I find a few drinks per week with friends enjoyable” is not a claim that would be in contest with the above. It’s just not a population argument.
Some people like it, some can sustain a lifetime of boozing, but there is a non-trivial amount of people who develop depression or alcoholism - and this is not a flaw of character or culture but simply a fact of interaction of alcohol with human biology and neurology.
It’s possible to go out and not drink. I can’t tolerate any amount of alcohol and I’ve definitely gone out drinking. Most people have been understanding. If you’re having a good time and encouraging drinking like everyone else is, no one really cares as long as you play the part. (“I would if I could, party it up.”) It helps to know a few mocktails that look alcoholic. :)
You are talking about literally the single substance responsible for the most human (mental/physical) health damage out of anything we've managed to come up with so far, and not for a lack of trying. You still have some time to reflect and delete this comment (I think HN gives you about an hour).
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.
People - and animals - just want to get fucked up. You can see this when animals get into fermented fruit. So there's been plenty of time for alcohol to get very entrenched in human culture.
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.
The peer reviewers are almost all people who live in the same culture of alcohol. So when a study counts people who only drink 11 times a year as basically abstaining, that makes perfect sense to them.
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.
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.