this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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Exactly!
I meant that plenty of people drink reasonable amounts alcohol all the time with no apparent issues.
It means that any amount of alcohol increases the odds of you dying sooner or having other negative health effects sooner (which will lead to you dying sooner). There is no amount that won't increase those odds. It says nothing about how much any given drink would impact your life span. I'm not saying it's negligible or significant, but I can't be bothered to look it up.
Come on, you have to say it's positively correlated rather than causative that's the whole point of the thread.
This isn't a hill I want to die on, but I don't think it's a meaningful claim without a bit more nuance.
Well, the WHO puts it in the same category as tobacco. Is tobacco just strongly correlated to cancer? And I don't need to say it is causative, because The Lancet did.
You can stack that data up against your anecdotes however you like.
I wonder if this is something that changed over time. As in preservatives and all sorts of chemicals being added to tobacco or alcohol. For example, I can smoke Japanese cigarettes without a problem. I've smoked Vietnam era MRE cigarettes, Old Ukrainian unfiltered cigarettes. But I can't smoke US made ones since around 2007, they make me sick and taste like ash.
Did you read that paper? I don't believe it supports your argument.
The mechanism by which smoking causes e.g. lung cancer and the significant rate at which it does so is well understood. I'm not convinced the same can currently be said of alcohol.
No, it's causal.
We know the mechanisms by which alcohol causes negative health effects, to basically all the systems in the body.
It's not a particularly strong effect for the occasional drinker, but the degree of confidence we have in the correlation is very strong, and we have an underlying model of the biological mechanisms that cause poor health outcomes.