Alcohol's benefits, you know like feeling like shit in the morning, liver failure, being an asshole...

There possibly might be something healthy about certain wines that, with other dietary things might keep people healthier afaik, but they probably took that idea and just out it as a factual benefit, alcohol makes you healthy, period!

Don't mind the liver disease, cognitive decline, cancers and what not more. Hell, even hangovers are grrrrreat!

On a side note: pot hangovers are awesome.

You cherry picked one line from an article that does talk about alcohol's harms, including in the opening paragraph.

Not to mention the "growing skepticism of alcohol's benefits" is also accurate because there have been cases over the years where some study will come out saying it's better to drink a little than not at all (despite awareness of many of alcohol's harms, but they were blamed on drinking in excess) and people have been growing more skeptical of those lately.

Belief in those benefits drove a different kind of drinking (like a glass of wine with dinner habit) than a lack of awareness (or denial) of the harms (which can lead to more severe alcoholism involving frequently drinking to get drunk). By addressing both the awareness of harms and skepticism of benefits, it's showing that both of those groups are on the decline.

The bar around the corner from me charges $16 for a single White Claw.

Man, I wish. Check out Canadian liquor prices. I don’t drink Bud but I’m pretty sure a six pack is $16 ($11.58 USD). Hard liquor is where we’re really hit though. Whisky is my drink of choice and it’s very expensive up here. I remember going to Boston a few years back and buying a few bottles of scotch because of how much cheaper it was, it was crazy.

And is less likely to turn certain people into assholes the way that alcohol does sometimes

I was drinking heavy but lack of funds meant lack of funs.

Something something recession indicator

When I was unemployed I went from drinking sparingly to drinking like six to eight beers and a bunch of shots every day. It was years of just getting messed up and having fun with my spouse.

Now it’s been way too long of doing that every day and we have bellies. We quit recently (after a medium/fast taper) and the only issue we’re both running into is horrible sleep. I assume it gets better after a few weeks.

I hate that it's because of visa/mastercard but alcohol is forbidden in porn too.

"There is no safe level of alcohol consumption" isn't the most helpful piece of information.

It’s mostly to bust the myth that there’s some level of alcohol consumption that’s actually beneficial for the health. You should never pretend that alcohol is good for your health.

You should look up the correlation between alcohol consumption and cancer rates. It's pretty clear-cut; the graph goes down ever so slightly down* and then keeps on rising. The "safe" limit would just be a function of how high a probability of getting cancer you're willing to tolerate.

*Medical issues are a common reason not to drink, so the cancer rate for the total non-drinking population is appreciably higher than it would be for a healthy non-drinking individual. There's no causation behind that drop to our knowledge.

PS: I said "cancer," but the same principle applies to liver failure and a host of other "fun" diseases.

For decades the line was that a glass or two of red wine had health benefits, but they were largely deriving that by comparing data to places like Italy, France, and Spain where wine consumption is normalized and they have other health factors.

Same stuff that started driving "The Mediterranean Diet".

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/red-wine/art-20048281

On further study though, it gets complicated:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10146095/

"Acute and short-term RW consumption seems to exert positive effects on antioxidant status, the lipid profile, thrombosis and inflammation markers, and the gut microbiota.

Importantly, a longer duration of treatment with RW has been shown to protect renal and cardiac function parameters in T2DM patients, suggesting that a moderate intake of RW may serve as a dietary supplement in diabetic patients.

On the other hand, blood pressure values, homocysteine levels, and gastrointestinal function seem to be impaired by short-term RW intake."

As far as I know, it's about on par. Light, infrequent drinking doesn't meaningfully increase your risk of disease any more than moderate consumption of red meat, for example. Frequent heavy drinking definitely does.

I have been following this subject for decades as I have spent most of the last 30 years selling booze.

You should think of it as like smoking weed more than eating a steak.

It's also so incredibly dependent on genetics that it's not even funny.

How are you defining "low to moderate"?

Weed is like that for me, I can't find the high at all, just feel stupid and tired and annoyed. It is so unpleasant. Tried a few times over the years and nope.

I'd point out that the same tactics the tobacco industry used are the same ones being used for fossil fuels. "Clean coal" and the like are just like filtered cigarettes. The lobbying and therefore conservative backing of existing industry groups is also the same. Climate "institutes" and private studies funded by fossil companies that magically agree with industry over every other scientist and reports. Conservative media doing industry propaganda (Rush Limbaughs grave is a gender neutral bathroom) until things get bad enough that everyone gets personal experience with the outcomes. Cancer, heart attacks, skin and teeth issues, etc. There was an increase in lung cancer rates until like the 2000s for men and a little later for women. Lung cancer rates have since drastically decreased as smoking rates continue to go down.

The problem with climate change is that same sort of lag to the worst effects. These heatwaves and wildfires we're experiencing are 30-50y from the worst of it and thats assuming we get our collective shit together tomorrow.

Congrats! The first month is the hardest. Come check out stopdrinking@lemmy.world, if you haven’t already.

When I started, I listened to many hours of the Happy Sober Podcast. Craig Beck does a good job of exposing the tricks alcohol plays on the brain.

Keep it up! It gets easier.

Same with me, I binged a few times in my 20s and it wasn't good at all. So I just stopped drinking altogether, alcoholism is in my family genes. It's a dumb ass habit to be honest. Waste of money, waste of health, waste of everything.

Damn, only $3.50 at my local bar. $5 or so for a nicer one. And if I’m feeling cheap, Applebees has $5 LITs.

It is a lot easier to do good statistics now than ever before. It’s really important to make sure studies use good methodology.

I’m personally opposed to a lot of meta studies because older studies tend to bin ages and covariates and there is zero logic or evidence to that except it making things seem simpler on paper.

Modern regression spline techniques and knowing to use f tests correctly actually give us much much more reliable models that better use observed data.

As Frank Harrel calls it, dichotomania (arbitrarily binning real values) is a scourge on science.

I would like to know if, health wise, it’s the same to drink 2 drinks per day or four every second day (excluding the obvious short term effects)

If we're being literal, yeah it's a bit scary that they need one drink every day.

If we're talking averages across time, 1 drink a day is equivalent to kicking back a 12 pack every other weekend (plus two more drinks). Just sounds like a good time.

To be clear I've had maybe one beer in the last year, and it was handed to me. I don't really have strong personal opinions about drinking in either direction.

You clearly have no history of addiction of you think a single drink a day is addiction.