It's the cause of 100% of my arguments and misunderstandings, haha.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Gotta go sometime and I’d rather do it having enjoyed a little bit of wine
Alcohol’s a helluva drug.
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 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
The problem with meta analysis of epidemiology is that so much epidemiology is shit, by flunkee MDs, that meta analysis just concludes data is mostly shit.
Of course it's a toxin. Even a few drinks induces ataxia by toxifying the cerebellum.
Slow motion suicide.
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!
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.
Let's fire up a peace pipe with tobacco then!
/j
Cool, let's. /nj
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
Thankfully we haven't progressed since then!
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.
Good thing someone else did the work long ago, so I don't need to keep drinking it.
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.
Damn, glad I quit drinking.
(Hits vape pen.)
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!
Welp. cracks open another one
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.
Well, I was thinking of dropping alcohol anyways.
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 ~~nutrition~~ public health, which is, problematic.
That analysis statistically was terrible and the title is disingenuous and misrepresents the data set.
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.
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 occasional drinkers.
At the end of the day the body breaks alcohol down into some carcinogens. No amount of that is good for you.
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).
Send this to Doug Ford, who has an agenda to keep everyone drunk, while he does not drink.