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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Is it a perfect fit for every person, in every situation? Absolutely not... just like all other very valid scientific measures out there (e.g., standardized measures of obesity) it's a benchmark that can serve as a control, not the be-all, end-all of discussion and interpretation.
http://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2013/11/w…
But seriously, how does this correlate with the whole "a glass of wine a day is GOOD for you!" thing?
According to most studies, 2 drinks a day is the RECOMMENDED amount to achieve alcohol's health benefits.! The medical community is afraid to recommend drinking alcohol, however. You can probably chalk this up to USA's puritanical christian history.
Also, it is well know that patients under report the number of drinks they consume by roughly 50%, so the RECOMMENDED about is most likely closer to 3 or 4 drinks a day. This works for me.
4-5 times a week
Drink more than that? Not good
It's worth keeping in mind that a staggering proportion of alcohol sold is apparently sold to a relatively small number of people, who are functioning alcoholics. I rather think the people writing these studies have a more thorough knowledge of the data than the excerpted in the few lines above reflect.
Ha! Who am I kidding? They didn't base this on any fucking data of alcohol's health effects.
If health is your main concern, you should be drinking 2 or 3 glasses of red wine per day as that is the sweet spot. Your current unhealthy lifestyle puts you at risk for cardiac problems, stroke, and other potentially fatal conditions.
The last time I went in for a checkup I asked what an acceptable level was and the doctor said 1-2 per day wouldn't be harmful. I didn't ask if she was factoring in my BMI or anything like that.
Moderation is never bad, but binge-drinking America seems to have a problem with that. I've experienced much better cultures for sure.
says a "heavy drinker" who drinks 2/day, and has been know to drink a beer in the afternoon on the weekend, which would constitute a 3rd drink, bringing the total to 15.
shame! be ashamed!
The second set of glasses are overfilled. You fill a wine glass to the widest part of the bell.
This is the purpose of wine glasses. The stem is to keep your hand from warming it up.
If all you want is a glass of wine without the foofaraw, use a small water glass or a tumbler or a friggin' jam jar. Unless I'm drinking something that costs more than $15, my preference is a nice sturdy Duralex Picardie 10.5 ounce tumbler, a few bucks at Cost Plus, filled to the dimples so I don't spill it down my shirt (I spill it down my shirt anyways). They're almost unbreakable (I break them anyways).
But you're still not going to get a ten ounce pour.
"If health is your main concern, you should be drinking 2 or 3 glasses of red wine per day as that is the sweet spot."
The statistics on this combine people that were binge drinkers and then stopped drinking with life-long abstainers. Beyond that, there is significant research that has found that "moderate" drinking of red wine doesn't actually have any serious health benefit and it's not obvious from the competing research just what is happening to cause the red wine to be helpful.
It's just as likely that rich people that happen to drink red wine and have good health practices and access to healthcare that there is some actual health benefit to drinking it. We might see the same statistics from expensive beers in another 40 years.
"Guideline 1
Reduce your long-term health risks by drinking no more than:
10 drinks a week for women, with no more than 2 drinks a day most days
15 drinks a week for men, with no more than 3 drinks a day most days"
Canada's alcoholic beverages aren't as watered down as Yankland's. Canadians also live longer on average. Why wouldn't the US adopt recommendations that countries with higher longevity rates make? Other than being American, of course.
Yes, it is not precise. All the doctors I know - and I mean all (including my wife) - would be full-blown alcoholics by the CDC guidelines.
This is questionable. The claim that really cracked me up was the average of 30 years of longevity lost (YPLL) - as presented in this paper which principally claims that alcohol is responsible for 1/10 deaths of working-age adults (a demographic perfectly selected for a follow-up paper about the cost to society). The secret to creating these very scary statistics is talking about "Alcohol Attributable Deaths" (AAD).
This is policy pushing epidemiological junk.
Don't bug me...I just discovered the BevMo at Southcenter.
And they have Carta Blanca...this weekend will be good!
The max recommendation in the UK amounts to about 2 12 oz beers a day for men, 1 for women. (I know because I read the labels on the beer I buy from Marks & Spencer.) That's pretty much the same as the top of the CDC moderate classification.
I don't know what the Dutch health ministry recommends, but my GP here advised me that 2 drinks a day was probably beneficial for an adult male of normal body mass.
I'm not sure the CDC's way off here.
The effect of red wine versus other alcohol is so small as to be just about useless. The health benefits of alcohol overall are relatively small and usually unsustainable as well -- if you can actually limit yourself to one drink every day, great, but hardly anyone does that, and if you deviate from that, the alcohol damages your health instead of helping it.
Switching out any red meat or chicken or egg or dairy for any vegetable or fruit or legume is the easiest and greatest change you can make for your health -- heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, neurological diseases, etc. Focusing on drinking alcohol to improve your health instead is like focusing on driving with your hands on a 10-2 position on the steeling wheel to be a safer driver, while at the same time you're driving drunk and texting and not wearing a seatbelt.
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/uprootin…
Also, we have biological models of alcohol's various benefits and costs, so these claims do not rest solely on correlational data. And of course, alcohol has been an important part of the human diet for at least 12,000 years, which is plenty of time for human DNA and bacterial biomes to evolve around it.
@ 33, you never point out that reducing all those animal foods is just as healthy as cutting them out entirely, but you always link to studies that find just that.
http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/a…
Short-Term Health Risks
Excessive alcohol use has immediate effects that increase the risk of many harmful health conditions. These immediate effects are most often the result of binge drinking and include the following—
*Risky sexual behaviors, including unprotected sex, sex with multiple partners, and increased risk of sexual assault. These behaviors can result in unintended pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.
but, really, it's entirely a US puritanical thing because of the implication that drinkers under 21 in canada, europe, etc are violating a "should not" disguised as health-related:
According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, if you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation, which is defined as no more than 1 drink per day for women and no more than 2 drinks per day for men.5 However, there are some persons who should not drink any alcohol, including those who are:
*Younger than age 21.
Also, the mortality rate is still 100%, so I'm gonna go ahead and drink a 12 pack tonight,CDC be damned.
To be fair, I drink Rainier, so It's really just the equivalent of 6 real beers.
From the publication 5 of that CDC link:
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/Di…
key definitions for alcohol
what is moderate alcohol consumption?
Moderate alcohol consumption is defined as up to 1 drink per day for women and up to 2 drinks per day for men.
what is heavy or high-risk drinking?
Heavy or high-risk drinking is the consumption of more than 3 drinks on any day or more than 7 per week for women and more than 4 drinks on any day or more than 14 per week for men.
what is binge drinking?
Binge drinking is the consumption within 2 hours of 4 or more drinks for women and 5 or more drinks for men.
If you break down who benefits from alcohol with more than 1 drink a day, it's really only "average" men who are 55+. Even 1 drink a day is slightly harmful for many people under 45.
http://alcoholresearchuk.org/downloads/f…
Not in that link, but people with healthy lifestyle and diets (high plants, low animals) get heart disease benefit from a little bit of alcohol as well, but since their risk is already low, the risks of alcohol (eg, cancer) outweigh the benefit by a healthy margin.
This is the problem with nearly all these studies; and they deliberately include those (and the choice of what is included is a political decision as much as "scientific") because without them the effects aren't nearly as pronounced. It's very hard to get "clean data" on which one might do an alternative analysis.
I have access to the full article from which @33's linked abstract is taken; this isn't even for 'alcohol related' mortality and morbidity; it's just aggregate mortality. They control for some other variables, but it in no way teases out what actually kills you: alcohol enhanced stupidity, aka "Hold My beer", dementia or liver disease. And even then, the crossover isn't exactly clear - the data isn't presented as Raku purports - your mortality risk doesn't double until you are drinking 5+ drinks at a sitting, all 7 days of the week.
For drinking <5 drinks at a sitting, the j-curve doesn't cross back over the teetotaler 'control' until you're doing it 5 days a week.
For these kinds of debates, it would be useful to control the data for various types of 'alcohol related mortality' - ie, let's look at liver disease, cardiac disease, dementia and cancer (oral, esophogeal, stomach, etc.) vs. "happened to be drunk while doing X".
Obviously, doing a randomized, controlled experiment on alcohol consumption would be ideal. But that's never been done with alcohol for obvious ethical reasons. It's also never been done on cigarette smoking for the same reasons -- that does not mean the overwhelming evidence isn't that smoking is harmful.
Teasing out the harmful effects of alcohol to make it look more healthy is ridiculous. But anyway, there are literally hundreds of studies that take every risk and benefit into account (some breakdown is at the last link I provided), which is why the vast majority of scientists don't recommend increasing anyone's alcohol intake, except for some people at high risk of heart disease who don't already drink and refuse to change their lifestyle/diet.
I really don't understand the problem. A glass of wine or beer with dinner is normal adult behavior. And, ideally, you're eating dinner once a day.
The damage to my liver cannot measure up to my grief and my personal achievement this week.
The one major difference for alcohol health effects between most women and men besides size is that more alcohol is associated with more risk of breast cancer -- in women and men, but in most men the risk is small to begin with. Women and men have essentially the same benefits and risks -- a little bit of drinking reduces heart disease risk if you have risk to begin with, and as you drink more the risk of all kinds of health problems goes way up.
Anyone know what they're referencing here? Drunk driving + Liver disease + Pancreatitis deaths or something?
As a proud, militant, emoticon hating nazi bastard, I really can't think of anything else to say but
:)
"Europeans" are not some kind of abstract concept that you can invoke when you are short of data and ideas. Some Europeans read here. The face they laugh in is yours, Max Solomon.
Besides, drinking wine is a social thing. Sharing one or two bottles over a meal with a friend is part of enjoying the meal, as long as nobody gets impaired. It's fairly usual to bring a bottle of wine when invited. Some people don't like the taste of alcohol and don't drink, even at convivial meals : that also is quite accepted.
What is not accepted at meals is moralizing assholes, even if the name of their moral is "health", even if they push for others to drink more instead of less.
Drinking more than one glass a meal, while alone, would be considered the beginnings of alcoholism. Drinking oneself to drunkenness is bad manners when done in company, (except where it's expected : among students in medecine, and in the military) - and it's raging alcoholism when done alone.
As for where the medical profession puts the bar between moderate drinking and excessive drinking, that's up to them. But it would be silly of y'all to believe that there are stark differences between medical experts of different parts of the world. Science is international already, folks.