Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!
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@coliver said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
Humans believed to have evolved from an alcohol consuming branch of the primate tree...
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170222-our-ancestors-were-drinking-alcohol-before-they-were-human
This has been speculation fora long time. Alcohol has been a vital part of our evolution since we split from our ancestors. Many modern anthropologists are positing that it is the entire reason for the agricultural revolution.
Yup, and likely humans continue to evolve in conjunction with it. It becomes more and more a part of our diet as time goes on.
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
Here is what we know.... moderate alcohol provides better overall health and longevity versus no alcohol.
Any desire, therefore, to avoid alcohol comes at the expensive of maximizing health. You cannot avoid alcohol with the goal of being healthy, you only avoid it in spite of the desire to be maximally healthy. You can do lots of other healthy things to try to mitigate the damage done by avoiding it, and with enough effort you can certainly do that, but you could do those things AND have proper alcohol for even better benefits.
So avoiding alcohol always comes at a health cost, even if you do "other things" to make it up.
I'm seeing this through more research, though I have no reason to treat alcohol as the almighty fix-all health drink. Only that it is associated with a longer lifespan and some health benefits.
But so are other things.
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Therefore, if i want to help my chances of a longer life, I can choose to drink moderate amounts of alcohol... among other choices.
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I still see it's all about the stress relief moderate drinking provides. Nothing more.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I still see it's all about the stress relief moderate drinking provides. Nothing more.
That's certainly possible. But there are two important factors here...
- You can't be sure that any substitute activity will provide the same level or type of stress relief.
- The studies may not rule this out, but they don't show this, either. So while you can hypothesize this, that's the end of the utility of it until someone studies that somehow.
Even if that is the reason that drinking alcohol is good for you, it doesn't change the result that it is good for you to do so.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
Therefore, if i want to help my chances of a longer life, I can choose to drink moderate amounts of alcohol... among other choices.
No, that's not how that works. Because, flip it around, if you wanted to die early, you could not drink alcohol, among other choices.
The problem is, is that "being healthy" is not created by picking just one or a few "healthy" practices and then those make up for anything else that you do. Health is created by your overall picture.
Being unhealthy, though, requires only one thing. Like Russian roulette, all by itself, can make you very unhealthy.
You can't do one healthy thing to magically offset one unhealthy thing. The damage from not drinking, in this case, is always there. No matter what "other healthy things" you choose to do, you will still have to accept the impact of not drinking - you'll always be less healthy than you could have been had you not done that one thing.
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The big thing is that, sadly, healthy is often more subject to your genetics then it is to your environment. We all know people who got cancer even though they ran 10 miles a day and ate nothing but kale/healthy food. Some people are incredibly unhealthy and live till their 90.
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You are looking at it like this....
Pick Two Healthy Activities In Order To Be Healthy
- Each Lots of Veggies
- Exercise
- Drink Alcohol
And you choosing A&B instead of, A&C, for example. But that is not at all how health works.
In this case the actual decision is like this...
Boolean Value - Choose Yes (Drink Alcohol) to gain +5 to life, or No (Don't Drink Alcohol) to not gain +5 to life.
That's it, that's all that it is. That one decision always carries the penalty (or benefit). The other choices you make, like jogging or having lots of water, stand on their own and while they are part of your overall healthy picture, they don't play into this decision and are red herrings.
Choosing to drink alcohol doesn't determine how long you live, but it does change the chances for how long you live.
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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!:
Here is what we know.... moderate alcohol provides better overall health and longevity versus no alcohol.
Any desire, therefore, to avoid alcohol comes at the expensive of maximizing health. You cannot avoid alcohol with the goal of being healthy, you only avoid it in spite of the desire to be maximally healthy. You can do lots of other healthy things to try to mitigate the damage done by avoiding it, and with enough effort you can certainly do that, but you could do those things AND have proper alcohol for even better benefits.
So avoiding alcohol always comes at a health cost, even if you do "other things" to make it up.
I'm seeing this through more research, though I have no reason to treat alcohol as the almighty fix-all health drink. Only that it is associated with a longer lifespan and some health benefits.
But so are other things.
Right, and that's all that anyone has said. No one is suggesting that there is a panacea, but only that alcohol is one of many choices and one that if you make the wrong decision, you lower your chances for a long and healthy life.
It's always about modifying your "chance for".
Think of D&D. Alcohol doesn't guarantee a good role, but it is a +1 modifier to your Constitution.
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Thank you for the very constructive debate about this and for all the time and effort you put into this discussion with me.
My goal was to never argue for the sake of being right, but for the sake of maximizing potential health for everyone.
It looks like the fact is that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with better health and longevity.
I have a lot to read and look into now, and perhaps become a strictly moderate to low alcohol consumer, so long as it's in a healthy drink, to help improve my health in addition to what I already do to be health conscious.
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In the long term, it would be great if more studies were done to find out more of the "why" alcohol has this association. Maybe we can isolate more good parts and remove more bad parts. Sadly, a study of this nature takes generations to do and is nearly impossible to do even with decades to collect data because you need to isolate behaviour over a lifetime to and people don't like committing to a lifetime of something for a study
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
In the long term, it would be great if more studies were done to find out more of the "why" alcohol has this association. Maybe we can isolate more good parts and remove more bad parts. Sadly, a study of this nature takes generations to do and is nearly impossible to do even with decades to collect data because you need to isolate behaviour over a lifetime to and people don't like committing to a lifetime of something for a study
Right, all we have to go on is these studies, and they may not be 100% inclusive of all factors and none of them are 100% definitive. But that's the best we have and to ignore them isn't good either.
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@tim_g said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
I have a lot to read and look into now, and perhaps become a strictly moderate to low alcohol consumer, so long as it's in a healthy drink, to help improve my health in addition to what I already do to be health conscious.
I think that, for those cases, nearly all sources agree (although this is mostly logical rather than empirical) that these things are factors....
- Genetics - while the average westerner benefits from alcohol (we think) certainly genetics matter and there are people who do not benefit.
- Less - when it doubt, err on the side of less not more. But not none.
- Steady - small amounts, likey with food, at an even pace is best; you can't make up on Saturday for a week of no drinks.
- Drunk - if you feel the alcohol doing much of anything, it's too much. A little warmth, that's ok. but if you feel fuzzy or drunk, likely you've gone well beyond the "for my health" limit. This is a good indicator, get buzzed once or twice and learn where that limit is for you. Is it one drink, two, four? Then maybe keep to no more than half that amount. For me, I can have several drinks in an evening while being well below my buzzed limit. but for my wife, that means only about half a drink at maximum. Your personal tolerance is universally believed to be a factor, but it will change over time so you have to gauge it a bit.
- Red Wine > Rose > White Wine > Beer > Cider > Mead > Cocktails > Shots
- Many healthy drinking cultures do spritzers (without the name) mixing water or soda water with wine to give you more fluids with less alcohol. Sangria is similar but has a lot of sugar from the fruit.
- Never let yourself feel like you had a drink (fluid) just because you had a drink (alcohol.) Find your healthy water rate, add alcohol on TOP of that, and then add a bit more water on top of THAT. Always err on the side of over-hydration when drinking. So if you have eight glasses of water a day, and you add one glass of wine, make it nine glasses of water a day. It's one glass of water for every drink in addition to your healthy normal water hydration rate.
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Personal wine drinking tip....
Something like the BotaBox Nighthawk. It's cheap, but high quality. Extremely dark red, in a box. Box wines make it far easier to portion control because you don't have the "there is just a little left in the bottle and it'll go bad" problem. Instead of lasting two days, the one box stays fresh for most of a month letting you drink less without waste, but it is always there for you to pour a little out into a glass. I keep it on the counter (in our bar, yes we have a bar in teh house.) If I use bottles, it's hard to not drink TWICE as fast as I should. With a box of wine, I find it really easy to drink regularly in small amounts instead of eratically in larger amounts. And at much lower cost.
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
little out into a glass. I keep it on the counter (in our bar, yes we have a bar in teh house.) If I use bottles, it's hard to not drink
Normal drinks for me is 1-3 shots Fireball a month, and over the past 3 years about 4 ginger beers a month.. probably well below the moderate level discussed above.
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@dashrender said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
little out into a glass. I keep it on the counter (in our bar, yes we have a bar in teh house.) If I use bottles, it's hard to not drink
Normal drinks for me is 1-3 shots Fireball a month, and over the past 3 years about 4 ginger beers a month.. probably well below the moderate level discussed above.
My own level is WAY too low. I go months without a drink.
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@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@dashrender said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
@scottalanmiller said in Red Wine is good for you: Myth busted!:
little out into a glass. I keep it on the counter (in our bar, yes we have a bar in teh house.) If I use bottles, it's hard to not drink
Normal drinks for me is 1-3 shots Fireball a month, and over the past 3 years about 4 ginger beers a month.. probably well below the moderate level discussed above.
My own level is WAY too low. I go months without a drink.
Before I found Crabby's I was the same. Then I meet up with you for drinks and drink more in one night than I do in a year.
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I have a drink (usually cider) maybe four times a year. I've kind of gotten on the sour beer kick though so that may be increasing.
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@coliver Have you tried Mead? Might be something you would like. Maybe a lambic like Framboise.
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The only way to say you drink for the health benefits, is to drink what the scientific community has agreed to what moderate drinking is:
https://moderatedrinking.com/home/default_home.aspx?p=md_defined
Any more than that, it no longer applies and is being abused for the sake of justifying yourself drinking.
