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These ‘experts’ can’t make up their minds. One year coffee is bad, the next it’s good, alcohol is good one year and bad the next, butter is bad one year and then a new study says it’s not bad. Everything in moderation. Cheers.
Moderation, indeed. I think that the problem is less with the experts or studies than with the publicity. Science is cumulative and the result of lots of people testing hypotheses and slicing data from different angles, and in general it's slow.
But a headline like "new study adds to data from which relative benefits vs risks of alcohol consumption may someday be determined" doesn't sell newspapers or drive Web page clicks!
These ‘experts’ can’t make up their minds. One year coffee is bad, the next it’s good, alcohol is good one year and bad the next, butter is bad one year and then a new study says it’s not bad. Everything in moderation. Cheers.
You misinterpret/overgeneralize/overapply the research. Just because a substance helps one thing doesn't mean it can't hurt something else. Most studies are very specific and controlled - one study can't look at all possible effects of a substance. So when you look at the effects of alcohol on heart disease vs. dementia, vs. falls in the elderly vs. whatever you may get different answers.
Science isn't simple...people are complicated! You have to add up all the negative and the positive effects and the magnitude of each - and likely take into account specific populations of people - then decide whether it is "good" or "bad". Black and white dichotomies are ultimately simplistic. If you want a simplistic answer it will end up being incorrect in many circumstances. Sorry - that's life!
IT'S A METASTUDY. They corralled a bunch of old studies - almost 600 of them - and glommed them all together to do some statistical hand waving.
The BMJ sez:
Quote:
Including all relevant material - good, bad, and indifferent - in meta -analysis admits the subjective judgments that meta-analysis was designed to avoid. Several problems arise in meta-analysis: regressions are often non -linear; effects are often multivariate rather than univariate; coverage can be restricted; bad studies may be included; the data summarised may not be homogeneous; grouping different causal factors may lead to meaningless estimates of effects; and the theory-directed approach may obscure discrepancies. Meta-analysis may not be the one best method for studying the diversity of fields for which it has been used.
We call it the ABSOLUTELY MAYBE method. Metastudies have their place but they are mostly useful to other researchers looking for a topic of study. They glom all these studies together in many instances because the original studies had small n (small # of test subjects). This has problems as well as advantages. The better solution is to design and implement a study with a large enough n to start with.
There is no way they properly evaluated 600 studies to determine how well they were designed. Every one of those 600 studies was not a well-designed study. They glommed together ALL types of alcohol, making no differentiation between beer, wine, liquor, and moonshine rotgut. Not to mention different types of each. RED wine is the one found to have positive health benefits, which is lost in all the static caused by poor design here. And the studies they selected go all the way back to 1990.
As far as I can tell, they never differentiated between someone who had had a single drink and someone who was legally drunk so all the handwaving about whether or not something was ACTUALLY alcohol related is bogus. I bet you an awful lot of these folks had also had a drink of water in the same time frame. Maybe water is the cause!
Correlation is not causation, ESPECIALLY not in a metastudy.
And if you ACTUALLY GO READ THE ARTICLE, THIS IS THE TITLE:
No level of alcohol consumption improves health
Not that NO LEVEL is safe.
Of course they have destroyed even that claim by glomming all types of alcohol together the way they did.
I'm not worried.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BeyondtheHorizon
Did you not read what I wrote? Legitimizing/legalizing a substance means more people will be inclined to use it. This is common sense. Many people drink at office functions/family events ect to "fit in". It's a social thing. They are being exposed to it regularly. There's no "crack" or heroin needles routinely being given out at weddings. Do you really think if you got rid of all bars serving alcohol that there would not be less dui? Of course dui would drop drastically without bars.
We did read it. It's just that your premises are flawed, and you're basing this on a badly flawed metastudy. Not to mention that we've already tried this and alcohol consumption not only did not decrease, accidents and other negative effects went UP. You know. Because Prohibition worked SO well.
Like I said. Not worried.
Last edited by Pyewackette; 08-25-2018 at 09:45 AM..
Recreational liquids and herbs have been a part of humankind since we became humans. The recent ban on MJ (in earth recordkeeping it's short term) is just a blip.
I read this and thought "Didn't I just read last week about a UK study that said non-drinkers die sooner than moderate drinkers?" I think there are "lies, damned lies and statistics" (Mark Twain said that).
7th Day Adventists live longest lives. Non-drinkers, non-meat eaters, strong community, religious, gardeners.
We all know certain things are more life-shortening. But let's have moderation in everything.
Are you gonna stop driving your car because it puts you in danger of car accidents?
Most accidents happen in the home. Gonna become homeless?
My great-grandfather smoked and drank and ate high cholesterol foods and died at 92.
His wife, non-smoker, non-drinker, died in her 70's. Genes rule.
These ‘experts’ can’t make up their minds. One year coffee is bad, the next it’s good, alcohol is good one year and bad the next, butter is bad one year and then a new study says it’s not bad. Everything in moderation. Cheers.
Research scientists can be more corrupt and untrustworthy as politicians.
A company pays you $100k to come up with some research to help sell your product. The other company pays someone $100k to prove your product has no value. And on and on it goes, confusing everybody!
I think it's bizarre that they conflated "occasional" drinking with having 1 drink per day, every day.
Quote:
Compared to abstinence, imbibing one "standard drink" -- 10 grammes of alcohol, equivalent to a small beer, glass of wine or shot of spirits -- per day, for example, ups the odds of developing at least one of two dozen health problems by about half-a-percent, the researchers reported.
I'm an occasional drinker - which means I have perhaps 1 drink a month on average - some months, it could be a couple, and I could go for 2 or 3 months without a drink. So if 365 drinks a year amounts to one half of a percent increase, my odds are apparently 0.016 percent of increased risk. I can live with those odds - or if I wanted even a drink a day and a half percent doesn't seem that extreme to me. Yes, 3 drinks a day and 7% risk is significant, but I think anyone having 3 drinks per day has other concerns to deal with anyway.
I don't drink so doesn't matter to me. However what does matter to me is the idiots who feel the need to operate a motor vehicle after consuming an alcoholic beverage. Putting everyone around them in harms way.
Not to mention that we've already tried this and alcohol consumption not only did not decrease, accidents and other negative effects went UP. You know. Because Prohibition worked SO well.
Like I said. Not worried.
i
We NEVER had true federal prohibition when there was widespread use of modern automobiles so saying there were more accidents is laughable. You're talking about the 1920's. You can't compare that to modern times obviously with dui checkpoints, licensing, modern safety features. Most people didn't drive like nowadays. True prohibition is federal prohibition, not individual states where you can just cross a border to get your beer.
"Although popular opinion believes that Prohibition failed, it succeeded in cutting overall alcohol consumption in half during the 1920s, and consumption remained below pre-Prohibition levels until the 1940s, suggesting that Prohibition did socialize a significant proportion of the population in temperate habits, at least temporarily.[2][3] Rates of liver cirrhosis "fell by 50 percent early in Prohibition and recovered promptly after Repeal in 1933."[4][2][5] Criticism remains that Prohibition led to unintended consequences such as a century of Prohibition-influenced legislation and the growth of urban crime organizations, though some scholars have argued that violent crime did not increase dramatically,[2] while others have argued that crime during the Prohibition era was properly attributed to increased urbanization, rather than the criminalization of alcohol use.[6][7] As an experiment it lost supporters every year, and lost tax revenue that governments needed when the Great Depression began in 1929"
"Alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkennness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.[2]"
People want to DRINK alcohol so they make excuses and rationalizations. People are sheep and the now the "popular" opinion is prohibition doesn't work. People break laws, why not just legalize murder since people murder even though it's against the law. This is illogical. Laws like prohibition would save lives, but people want that beer with game.
Did you not read what I wrote? Legitimizing/legalizing a substance means more people will be inclined to use it. This is common sense. Many people drink at office functions/family events ect to "fit in". It's a social thing. They are being exposed to it regularly. There's no "crack" or heroin needles routinely being given out at weddings. Do you really think if you got rid of all bars serving alcohol that there would not be less dui? Of course dui would drop drastically without bars.
Your problem is that common sense is extremist. Legalizing heroin would save many lives, since overdose deaths are often caused by unknown quality. Just about all street drugs are adulterated with something, sometimes very dangerous somethings. Meanwhile, there is no indication that legalization of pot has increased adult pot use, though it seems to have increased among college age binge drinkers.
It's not like there has ever been a shortage of illicit drugs in the US. Organized crime loads truckloads of factory pharmaceuticals right out the back door every day, and container shipments of all sorts of drugs hit US shores, while customs agents pocket a few thousand in bribes to look the other way. If the bride and groom at the wedding are druggies, you can bet that the whole wedding party and half the guests are high.
Do you think that everyone with access to drugs will get high? I am a family joke; every year I make a New Years resolution to drink more, and every year I fail. I just don't think of it. I reserve a bottle of good whiskey for special occasions. I just finished the last of one - after 25 years. How much I drink, or don't drink, is not your problem.
But yet you continually see articles about how healthy it is to have a few drinks every day. Those who make money from selling alcohol, are behind this.
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