Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!
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I also drink no soda, no fruit juices, rarely have dessert, etc. Also all things considered healthy. I really have loads and loads of behaviours generally considered quite healthy. I sleep as long as my body lets me almost every night. I never wake up to alarms.
Why the heck am I not super healthy?!?!?
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I guess, in reality, I say I'm not healthy because I'm overweight and it's just what overweight people say. But my only actual ailments of any type are caused by things like past broken bones or other physical injury, not a lack of general health. I've not had a real checkup in decades, never get sick, never take medicine, etc. All of my health issues are like "broken thumb from car incident" or "wife dropped loaded palette jack on foot" or "stepped backwards onto a blade damaging the ligiment in my foot" rather than "high blood pressure" or "gets ill often".
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
All of the "pro alcohol" studies say the same thing... If you have a healthy drink a day, you will see the health benefits of that drink, even if it contains a small amount of alcohol.
That's not what the studies I've seen (and linked) claim. Maybe that's what they measured, but it is not what they state as the result. The words and meaning you are using are explicitely different than the words and meaning that they use.
I'm not debating what they are claiming. I'm saying what they are claiming is incorrect and inconclusive based on the study they did. You can see that for yourself if you bother to check.
That's fine, just be clear that you are saying that they are lying and falsifying the results. Which I agree they likely do, they are doctors mostly and I don't trust the field (I don't trust the process that they have to agree to to become doctors.) But those same problems exist with the studies that say that alcohol is bad. So you can't make that claim, either. If you are going to claim that you have studies that say that all alcohol is bad, then you are stuck accepting these more numerous, more rigous, and less political studies as being even more meaningful. you can't have it both ways.
As much as I don't trust doctors, the study from the UK gov't is far, far more useless as it shows nothing at all based on the complete lack of data collected.
So the bottom line is, until someone does an actual study, what we know is that alcohol poses so little health risk that there is no rational reason to be concerned about it as no one can find conclusive evidence of its risk except in extreme amounts that are not normal and that applies to all things, even things we know are healthy in small dosages. What we don't know is if alcohol in "proper" amounts is actually healthy, unhealthy, or neutral. But we do know that it is so close to neutral that modern medicine can't agree on which side it falls.
No, what we know is that minute amounts of alcohol in an otherwise healthy drink shows the healthy benefits of that drink... and that too many drinks with alcohol shows the negatice impact of alcohol. There is no study on JUST the alcohol alone.
We also know for a fact alcohol itself is a poison. It's well known that alcohol is bad. The amount is beyond the point. Just like gasoline is bad, but a little bit won't kill you, especially if you mask a little bit (proper amount) it in a V8 drink.
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I also drink no soda, no fruit juices, rarely have dessert, etc. Also all things considered healthy. I really have loads and loads of behaviours generally considered quite healthy. I sleep as long as my body lets me almost every night. I never wake up to alarms.
Why the heck am I not super healthy?!?!?
Maybe a lifetime of alcohol consumption? You can't rule it out... Just saying.
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I guess, in reality, I say I'm not healthy because I'm overweight and it's just what overweight people say. But my only actual ailments of any type are caused by things like past broken bones or other physical injury, not a lack of general health. I've not had a real checkup in decades, never get sick, never take medicine, etc. All of my health issues are like "broken thumb from car incident" or "wife dropped loaded palette jack on foot" or "stepped backwards onto a blade damaging the ligiment in my foot" rather than "high blood pressure" or "gets ill often".
Sure, if you have such a small amount of alcohol that it just chemically doesn't matter... like smoking one cigarette every 10 years... (exaggerated to make point clear), then no problem. If it's not enough, it's simply just not enough. But that's not what this discussion is about really.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
We also know for a fact alcohol itself is a poison.
That's just a silly thing said in that British fluff piece. You can call alcohol a poison, but all that it means is that poisons in the quantity are fine, maybe even good. Just like how radiation is good for us, until we get too much of it. Water toxicity can kill, too, but we don't call water a poison. Tons of things that we eat, some that are necessary for life, become dangerous at elevated levels.
PsychologyToday talks about the American denial of the science behind the value of alcohol and how calling it a toxin is pseudoscience to pander to uniquely American anti-alcohol ideals.
Actually a quite good article looking at it from the American social side.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
All of the "pro alcohol" studies say the same thing... If you have a healthy drink a day, you will see the health benefits of that drink, even if it contains a small amount of alcohol.
That's not what the studies I've seen (and linked) claim. Maybe that's what they measured, but it is not what they state as the result. The words and meaning you are using are explicitely different than the words and meaning that they use.
I'm not debating what they are claiming. I'm saying what they are claiming is incorrect and inconclusive based on the study they did. You can see that for yourself if you bother to check.
That's fine, just be clear that you are saying that they are lying and falsifying the results. Which I agree they likely do, they are doctors mostly and I don't trust the field (I don't trust the process that they have to agree to to become doctors.) But those same problems exist with the studies that say that alcohol is bad. So you can't make that claim, either. If you are going to claim that you have studies that say that all alcohol is bad, then you are stuck accepting these more numerous, more rigous, and less political studies as being even more meaningful. you can't have it both ways.
As much as I don't trust doctors, the study from the UK gov't is far, far more useless as it shows nothing at all based on the complete lack of data collected.
So the bottom line is, until someone does an actual study, what we know is that alcohol poses so little health risk that there is no rational reason to be concerned about it as no one can find conclusive evidence of its risk except in extreme amounts that are not normal and that applies to all things, even things we know are healthy in small dosages. What we don't know is if alcohol in "proper" amounts is actually healthy, unhealthy, or neutral. But we do know that it is so close to neutral that modern medicine can't agree on which side it falls.
No, what we know is that minute amounts of alcohol in an otherwise healthy drink shows the healthy benefits of that drink... and that too many drinks with alcohol shows the negatice impact of alcohol. There is no study on JUST the alcohol alone.
Alcohol is never consumed alone. I'm not saying that as an excuse, it's just important to understand that alcohol consumed alone isn't the same thing. So even a study on that, wouldn't be useful. Because we don't know if it is the alcohol itself, or a drink with SOME alcohol (no one drinks straight alcohol, it hurts), or that alcohol acts as a tincture and makes us absord other nutrients, etc.
Same with salt. no one has ever done a study of salt to show its health benefits without that salt being a part of other food.
Yes we know, or everyone agrees, that some salt is good for us and too much is highly toxic. Even though we can't study someone that eats only salt.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I guess, in reality, I say I'm not healthy because I'm overweight and it's just what overweight people say. But my only actual ailments of any type are caused by things like past broken bones or other physical injury, not a lack of general health. I've not had a real checkup in decades, never get sick, never take medicine, etc. All of my health issues are like "broken thumb from car incident" or "wife dropped loaded palette jack on foot" or "stepped backwards onto a blade damaging the ligiment in my foot" rather than "high blood pressure" or "gets ill often".
Sure, if you have such a small amount of alcohol that it just chemically doesn't matter... like smoking one cigarette every 10 years... (exaggerated to make point clear), then no problem. If it's not enough, it's simply just not enough. But that's not what this discussion is about really.
My point was that with symptoms of radiation poisoning (my mother was killed from radon exposure they believe, and I grew up with it at lower levels) and a life time of drinking, I'm actually quite healthy. Quite healthy and overweight. Maybe the alcohol helps keep me healthy even with my weight up.
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The UT study that PT quotes, takes into account a lifetime of drinking habits (it was done over decades) and adjusted for correlations specifically because they wanted to tackle the belief that healthy people drink, rather than drinking makes you healthy (which was a really reasonable thing to think might have been true) and found that it was the alcoholic drinks that was tied to people being healthier. And it wasn't wine, it was only drinking that was studied.
What they found is that abstraining and heavily over drinking were the two most dangerous categories.
What we know from our best research, is that drinking in moderation is important to good health. Studies have shown that abstaining is actively unhealthy.
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
All of the "pro alcohol" studies say the same thing... If you have a healthy drink a day, you will see the health benefits of that drink, even if it contains a small amount of alcohol.
That's not what the studies I've seen (and linked) claim. Maybe that's what they measured, but it is not what they state as the result. The words and meaning you are using are explicitely different than the words and meaning that they use.
I'm not debating what they are claiming. I'm saying what they are claiming is incorrect and inconclusive based on the study they did. You can see that for yourself if you bother to check.
That's fine, just be clear that you are saying that they are lying and falsifying the results. Which I agree they likely do, they are doctors mostly and I don't trust the field (I don't trust the process that they have to agree to to become doctors.) But those same problems exist with the studies that say that alcohol is bad. So you can't make that claim, either. If you are going to claim that you have studies that say that all alcohol is bad, then you are stuck accepting these more numerous, more rigous, and less political studies as being even more meaningful. you can't have it both ways.
As much as I don't trust doctors, the study from the UK gov't is far, far more useless as it shows nothing at all based on the complete lack of data collected.
So the bottom line is, until someone does an actual study, what we know is that alcohol poses so little health risk that there is no rational reason to be concerned about it as no one can find conclusive evidence of its risk except in extreme amounts that are not normal and that applies to all things, even things we know are healthy in small dosages. What we don't know is if alcohol in "proper" amounts is actually healthy, unhealthy, or neutral. But we do know that it is so close to neutral that modern medicine can't agree on which side it falls.
No, what we know is that minute amounts of alcohol in an otherwise healthy drink shows the healthy benefits of that drink... and that too many drinks with alcohol shows the negatice impact of alcohol. There is no study on JUST the alcohol alone.
Alcohol is never consumed alone. I'm not saying that as an excuse, it's just important to understand that alcohol consumed alone isn't the same thing. So even a study on that, wouldn't be useful. Because we don't know if it is the alcohol itself, or a drink with SOME alcohol (no one drinks straight alcohol, it hurts), or that alcohol acts as a tincture and makes us absord other nutrients, etc.
Same with salt. no one has ever done a study of salt to show its health benefits without that salt being a part of other food.
Yes we know, or everyone agrees, that some salt is good for us and too much is highly toxic. Even though we can't study someone that eats only salt.
Then you need to be clear on what you say is healthy. You don't know if alcohol is healthy. There's no study on alcohol.
We do know that red wine has health benefits if no more than on small drink daily. 7 drinks in One night is not the same thing.
But that's never what you say. You say alcohol is healthy, and I see nothing that says so.
I do see that salt is an essential nutrient that your body needs and you have health issues without it. Not so with alcohol.
So to say alcohol is healthy is baseless. To justify drinking more than what we know is baseless. I didn't see any studies on one beer a day, just that it's the alcohol equivalent of a 8oz glass of wine.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
All of the "pro alcohol" studies say the same thing... If you have a healthy drink a day, you will see the health benefits of that drink, even if it contains a small amount of alcohol.
That's not what the studies I've seen (and linked) claim. Maybe that's what they measured, but it is not what they state as the result. The words and meaning you are using are explicitely different than the words and meaning that they use.
I'm not debating what they are claiming. I'm saying what they are claiming is incorrect and inconclusive based on the study they did. You can see that for yourself if you bother to check.
That's fine, just be clear that you are saying that they are lying and falsifying the results. Which I agree they likely do, they are doctors mostly and I don't trust the field (I don't trust the process that they have to agree to to become doctors.) But those same problems exist with the studies that say that alcohol is bad. So you can't make that claim, either. If you are going to claim that you have studies that say that all alcohol is bad, then you are stuck accepting these more numerous, more rigous, and less political studies as being even more meaningful. you can't have it both ways.
As much as I don't trust doctors, the study from the UK gov't is far, far more useless as it shows nothing at all based on the complete lack of data collected.
So the bottom line is, until someone does an actual study, what we know is that alcohol poses so little health risk that there is no rational reason to be concerned about it as no one can find conclusive evidence of its risk except in extreme amounts that are not normal and that applies to all things, even things we know are healthy in small dosages. What we don't know is if alcohol in "proper" amounts is actually healthy, unhealthy, or neutral. But we do know that it is so close to neutral that modern medicine can't agree on which side it falls.
No, what we know is that minute amounts of alcohol in an otherwise healthy drink shows the healthy benefits of that drink... and that too many drinks with alcohol shows the negatice impact of alcohol. There is no study on JUST the alcohol alone.
Alcohol is never consumed alone. I'm not saying that as an excuse, it's just important to understand that alcohol consumed alone isn't the same thing. So even a study on that, wouldn't be useful. Because we don't know if it is the alcohol itself, or a drink with SOME alcohol (no one drinks straight alcohol, it hurts), or that alcohol acts as a tincture and makes us absord other nutrients, etc.
Same with salt. no one has ever done a study of salt to show its health benefits without that salt being a part of other food.
Yes we know, or everyone agrees, that some salt is good for us and too much is highly toxic. Even though we can't study someone that eats only salt.
Then you need to be clear on what you say is healthy. You don't know if alcohol is healthy. There's no study on alcohol.
PT says that there is and that it is shown to be healthy. They've accounted for the exact things you are stating as coincidental and say that that's false rumours and not substantiated.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
But that's never what you say. You say alcohol is healthy, and I see nothing that says so.
That's what PT said you would say. It actually says that in the article...
"Lifehacker and Wired readers can now safely feel that if they go to parties or out to dinner with friends and behave socially, but drink only ginger ale and fruit juice, they'll live just as long as those who actually drink alcohol.
They won't. This has been disproven time and again by the best science we can come up with. But the rejection of science in this case is presented regularly by leading popular scientific and medical publications and spokespeople - and the idea that alcohol prolongs life will certainly never be spoken in schools. And you will (on average) die sooner if you believe them.
What can we say; we know alcohol's a toxin. We'll never believe alcohol can be good for you. This is America, for chrissake! We're willing to die for our true beliefs!"
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I do see that salt is an essential nutrient that your body needs and you have health issues without it. Not so with alcohol.
How is one something you can claim and one not? If you say we can't measure alcohol unless people injest nothing but alcohol, then that must also apply to salt. It's an identical premise. Both are bad when you have zero, both have a healthy moderation number, both are unhealthy at inappropriately large quantities, and neither can be measured when taken alone but are always mixed in with other things.
Why then with everything the same, is one seen as an essetial nutrient and the other as poison?
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I didn't see any studies on one beer a day, just that it's the alcohol equivalent of a 8oz glass of wine.
There are lots, though. And the UT one that PT quotes specifically includes that.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
So to say alcohol is healthy is baseless.
Your belief here is that all observation, evidence, and studies aren't just wrong, but backwards, and that all researchers the world over are lying about it. And based on that belief that all studies and info are wrong, you consider it baseless. But there is no basis for feeling it is baseless.
We have pretty solid evidence, it appears, that alcohol is good for you (this ALWAYS means at the right quantity the same with water, sunshine and exercise) and that the studies that claim otherwise border on not even being able to be called studies.
The more I look, the more clear it is that there IS absolutely solid science (and logic) behind alcohol being good for us.
Worst case, if we got the science wrong and alcohol isn't the cause of the health, but just the trigger of other things, you still can't determine what those other things are and so... better have the alcohol so that those other things happen.
So basically there are two reasonable options...
- Alcohol itself is good for you.
- Something that happens with incredibly high incidence with alcohol and is almost universally absent without it makes us healthier not just on its own, but enough to completely obliterate any negatives from alcohol.
In either case, there is only one rational option - to drink the alcohol since if case 1 is the correct one, we need it. And if case 2 is the correct one, we haven't managed to identify what that other factor is and we need to have the alcohol to make sure that we get it.
So while you can try to argue that the scientific ability to measure alcohol in isolation isn't enough and that alcohol and salt can't be proven good or bad. What you can't argue is that drinking alcohol as an activity, isn't good for you.
That might be the most important actionable takeaway. We don't know if alcohol is good for you, but we definitely know that drinking alcohol is good for you.
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
All of the "pro alcohol" studies say the same thing... If you have a healthy drink a day, you will see the health benefits of that drink, even if it contains a small amount of alcohol.
That's not what the studies I've seen (and linked) claim. Maybe that's what they measured, but it is not what they state as the result. The words and meaning you are using are explicitely different than the words and meaning that they use.
I'm not debating what they are claiming. I'm saying what they are claiming is incorrect and inconclusive based on the study they did. You can see that for yourself if you bother to check.
That's fine, just be clear that you are saying that they are lying and falsifying the results. Which I agree they likely do, they are doctors mostly and I don't trust the field (I don't trust the process that they have to agree to to become doctors.) But those same problems exist with the studies that say that alcohol is bad. So you can't make that claim, either. If you are going to claim that you have studies that say that all alcohol is bad, then you are stuck accepting these more numerous, more rigous, and less political studies as being even more meaningful. you can't have it both ways.
As much as I don't trust doctors, the study from the UK gov't is far, far more useless as it shows nothing at all based on the complete lack of data collected.
So the bottom line is, until someone does an actual study, what we know is that alcohol poses so little health risk that there is no rational reason to be concerned about it as no one can find conclusive evidence of its risk except in extreme amounts that are not normal and that applies to all things, even things we know are healthy in small dosages. What we don't know is if alcohol in "proper" amounts is actually healthy, unhealthy, or neutral. But we do know that it is so close to neutral that modern medicine can't agree on which side it falls.
No, what we know is that minute amounts of alcohol in an otherwise healthy drink shows the healthy benefits of that drink... and that too many drinks with alcohol shows the negatice impact of alcohol. There is no study on JUST the alcohol alone.
Alcohol is never consumed alone. I'm not saying that as an excuse, it's just important to understand that alcohol consumed alone isn't the same thing. So even a study on that, wouldn't be useful. Because we don't know if it is the alcohol itself, or a drink with SOME alcohol (no one drinks straight alcohol, it hurts), or that alcohol acts as a tincture and makes us absord other nutrients, etc.
Same with salt. no one has ever done a study of salt to show its health benefits without that salt being a part of other food.
Yes we know, or everyone agrees, that some salt is good for us and too much is highly toxic. Even though we can't study someone that eats only salt.
Then you need to be clear on what you say is healthy. You don't know if alcohol is healthy. There's no study on alcohol.
PT says that there is and that it is shown to be healthy. They've accounted for the exact things you are stating as coincidental and say that that's false rumours and not substantiated.
I see the article, but no references to the studies done... I can write a referenceless article too, saying the opposite...
Maybe the link isn't showing up on my phone?
I'll look again later. Out for the night.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I see the article, but no references to the studies done... I can write a referenceless article too, saying the opposite...
The research was done by UT and is linked, but UT has moved it. It was a reference at the time, though, and it's a well known study that has been linked elsewhere. PT is peer reviewed, so was checked when the article was new.
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This is it, however...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01286.x/abstract
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Here is the full abstract...
Abstract
Background: Growing epidemiological evidence indicates that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with reduced total mortality among middle-aged and older adults. However, the salutary effect of moderate drinking may be overestimated owing to confounding factors. Abstainers may include former problem drinkers with existing health problems and may be atypical compared to drinkers in terms of sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between alcohol consumption and all-cause mortality over 20 years among 1,824 older adults, controlling for a wide range of potential confounding factors associated with abstention.
Methods: The sample at baseline included 1,824 individuals between the ages of 55 and 65. The database at baseline included information on daily alcohol consumption, sociodemographic factors, former problem drinking status, health factors, and social-behavioral factors. Abstention was defined as abstaining from alcohol at baseline. Death across a 20-year follow-up period was confirmed primarily by death certificate.
Results: Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting for all covariates, abstainers and heavy drinkers continued to show increased mortality risks of 51 and 45%, respectively, compared to moderate drinkers.
Conclusions: Findings are consistent with an interpretation that the survival effect for moderate drinking compared to abstention among older adults reflects 2 processes. First, the effect of confounding factors associated with alcohol abstention is considerable. However, even after taking account of traditional and nontraditional covariates, moderate alcohol consumption continued to show a beneficial effect in predicting mortality risk.
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Okay so far every article and study posted so far is useless and doesn't tell us anything real that we can use, except this last article.
This last article seems to be something new to this discussion, not about what we were discussing such as 1 8oz red wine per day blah blah... But about social drinking, and how long you live... Not due to alcohol, but because of what you do when under the effects of alcohol when you drink socially... which is going to be more than 8oz of red wine.
I didn't read yet the whole article or the study because I need to sleep, but will look it over more tomorrow and we'll see what I can conclude from it.
Perhaps things are different than we both thought.
