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!
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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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!
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.
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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.
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Thankfully we haven't progressed since then!
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...
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The oldest recipe we have found was a recipe for beer.
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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.
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Damn, glad I quit drinking.
(Hits vape pen.)
They also found that drinking raises the risk of:
...sexually transmitted infections
This statement really made we wonder if they thought about actual causality at all.
From a summary:
Drinking damages the liver and may make the body more vulnerable to infectious diseases, including sexually transmitted infections and tuberculosis.
Or from the review itself:
Infectious disease
The causal impact of alcohol on the four broad categories of infectious disease from the last Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health [1] has been confirmed in recent reviews [15, 16]. The main biological mechanism involves alcohol-induced liver dysfunction, which disrupts both non-specific innate and adaptive immune responses through acute and chronic alcohol consumption [80-84]. Lowered immune responses increase susceptibility to communicable diseases. More specific biological pathways are described in the references listed in Table 1.
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I've been working on fully cutting out alcohol from my diet. I tried for years but I think I am finally succeeding. Haven't had a drink in almost two months.
Great work dude, keep it up 💪
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Gotta go sometime and I’d rather do it having enjoyed a little bit of wine
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While all of this is true and concerning, now is not the time to raw dog reality.
Doing weed is also bad for me. It got me quite severe health effects that I'm dealing with right now.
I'm not regretting it for a second and the second my issues are under control I'll use weed again (in much lower doses) because living in the raw reality right now just makes you depressed and suicidal. I'm m neither, and I'll contribute that happily to pot, it made life nice again for a few years
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Welp. cracks open another one
I’ll drink to that
My dad worked on a project that could have made him and his colleague probably very rich (at least, it was successfully done to great wealth by someone else many years later) but his colleague had problems with alcohol, drunk called the investors and whatever he said made them pull out such that they had to cancel the project.
His drinking got worse from there for him and he spent years in and out of prison. When I was about to go to college and my dad was meeting him after he got back out he took me aside and strictly warned me not to go crazy drinking in college. I truthfully told him that I don’t drink at all and I guess that was inconceivable to him because he started going, “You WILL drink. EVERYBODY drinks. Don’t lie and…” so on so forth.
It never seemed appealing to me what with seeing people ruin their lives and act foolish, the odor, all the money people spend on it etc. I’m sure the taste is fine if you push through and try it a bunch but from seeing the effects I never wanted to. Meanwhile visiting other people’s houses as a kid my friends would be doing stuff like asking his mom if he could sniff her wineglass at dinner. 💀
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Eh, I quit a few years ago. When you have to have conversations with yourself about it, it’s time. So cold turkey I went, luckily NBD for me. The only time I miss it is after a really trying, long day; or I’m just craving flavors that aren’t sugary drinks like soda. I don’t like sweet drinks very much. Alcohol lends an intensity to flavors that’s impossible to replicate.
Looking back at it I’m really glad I quit.
Anyway, hopefully added years/stopped shaving years off my life. We’ll see.
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I don't know how someone who grew up around people who drinked could have any other perception of alcohol than as poison. I don't know a single person who drinks regularly who doesn't have health conditions directly linked to it.
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.
That analysis statistically was terrible and the title is disingenuous and misrepresents the data set.
A review of the relationship between dimensions of alcohol consumption and the burden of disease: 2026 update including Mendelian randomisation studies https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.70435
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Alcohol’s a helluva drug.
The amount of alcoholics in comment sections like this is crazy.
Half of the people are basically saying "I'd rather die that stop alcohol", the other half tries to cope by saying that all of these things about the dangers of alcohol are either false or exaggerated.
Even the crazy meat lovers are not that extreme.
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