Comment by savanaly
19 hours ago
Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)
19 hours ago
Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)
To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true.
It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3.
I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above zero" is bad, and then reading the actual underlying paper they refer to, which clearly states exactly the opposite finding. I think it is an extension of the public policy belief that the public cannot be trusted with moderation, and so therefore must be communicated to in absolutes, and nobody will read the underlying paper anyway.
Most modern research I have seen says there is no safe levels of alcohol where you will get no negative effects on your body. 7 glasses of wine per week isn’t that low. Is it worse than sometimes eating crap food? Maybe not. But it isn’t without risks.
Like I said on another topic: for the average man on earth, you're probably right, the carcinogenic effect of alcohol is smaller than eating red meat.
But if you are overweight or a preclinical obese, any amount of alcohol put you closer to clinical obesity.
i don't agree, i think you are just describing a measurement problem, we have a clear mechanistic understanding of why 'anything above zero' would be bad, and are able to measure this in sufficiently large populations for larger drinkers. the effect size is smaller and thus unmeasurable above the noise floor for one glass a night, but the mechanistic story is clear.
Simple mechanistic explanations in biology are often wrong. For example, oxidative stress does not have a linear no-threshold harm.
For alcohol, almost every big study has shown either no discernible effects going from zero to 1 drink per day, or actual slight benefits going from 0 to 1 that then reverse when increasing beyond that. There is not strong consensus which of these is true, but there's definitely no real evidence that 1 drink per day is harmful as measured by all-cause mortality.
See GBD 2020 in the Lancet (which showed a slight J-curve), Wood in the Lancet 2018 (optimally low risk at 100g ethanol per week, or ~1 drink per day), Zhao in Jama (no discernible negative effects at 1 drink per day, no benefits either, no J-curve), and the latest National Acadamies review showing lowest all-cause mortality at about 1 drink per day (so, a J-curve).
Alcoholism has tons of negative effects. But these seem to start at around 2 drinks per day and rise rapidly from there.
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isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.
It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this.
All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation". I think the medical establishment is quite well aligned on this. One source is the CDC, which defines moderate drinking to be roughly an order of magnitude more alcohol consumption than "one drink every Friday night."
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcoh...
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Everything in moderation, especially moderation.
According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption (1). Every molecule of alcohol is measurably bad for you physically
People want to conflate their personal desires and perceived social benefits with health benefits because mental health and physical health have overlaps
However they need to be separate to actually make a claim about alcohol as there are millions of people in functional communities that reject alcohol and have non of the negative effects
(1) https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
That's not a study from the WHO, it's a public statement they published in Lancet. It's an opinion piece.
Moreover, the WHO never changed their stance when later big studies showed that the "lowest risk" level is not actually at zero drinks.
The timeline was this:
- In 2018, a study was published in the Lancet that was the Global Burden of Disease analysis. They claimed the modeled minimum risk exposure was zero drinks. But the magnitude effects were extremely small: moving from zero to one drink a day pushed the incidence rate of alcohol-associated health effects from 914 per 100,000 people to 918 per 100,000 people. This was the basis of the "no safe level."
- Four years later, an updated Global Burden of Disease analysis, also published in the Lancet, actually reversed course on this. After controlling for more factors, they found risk was actually slightly J-shaped, and for 40+ year olds the theoretical minimum risk was about 0.5 drinks per day. The WHO ignored this updated study when they wrote their opinion piece in 2023.
- Another big study with ~600k participants published in 2018 in the Lancet shows lowest total risk consumption levels at 1 drink per day, with mortality rising above that level. The WHO also ignored this.
- The JAMA study in 2023, with >4 million participants, showed no benefit to low-volume drinking, and also no increase in harms from low volume (1 drink daily) drinking. Again, the WHO ignored it.
Several other studies have shown either no discernible risk change between zero and 1 drink per day, or lowest possible risk at 1 drink per day.
But the WHO and much of the public health policy community ignores almost all of the actual credible science on this because it does not fit with their ideology. It's a huge problem with public health policy: the actual scientists and statisticians are doing great work, but if it's not what the policy people want to hear, they discard it and keep repeating their mantra.
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> According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption
This would be a misquote, but you didn't use quotes. The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption.
> The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body.
I could see why you would say that from this:
> “We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,” explains Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges,
But that seems to be a mixture of some language difficulty and some intentional hyperbole.
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