Drinking Alcohol May Extend Your Life 548
Adolytsi writes "MSNBC has an interesting article on an Italian study on alcoholism. While the obvious notion of overconsumption of alcohol being detrimental to one's health is supported, apparently drinking it in moderation can actually extend your lifespan. A study on over 1 million drinkers and 94,000 deaths yielded the results: "According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol — up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women — reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent, the team reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
However, "things radically change" when consumption goes beyond these levels, study leader Dr. Augusto Di Castelnuovo, from Catholic University of Campobasso, said in a statement. Men who have more than four drinks per day and women who have more than two drinks per day not only lose the protection that alcohol affords, but they increase their risk of death, the data indicates.""
Four drinks a day? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I don't hink I'd consider four drinks every day to be "moderate" drinking.
Re:Legal age (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, though, bars around military bases tended to not pay a lot of attention to specific details like age when shown a military ID (at least back when I was in). That doesn't make it any more legal, but at least we could still show up to morning PT drunk. Believe it or not, it's an even worse idea than it sounds.
Re:Alcohol + what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can't drink (Score:3, Interesting)
I wondered if they remembered to take into account people who don't drink because of pre-existing health conditions that result in shorter life spans.
Yes. Well, sort of. They normalized for dietary habits, physical activity, and general health as they correlate to drinking and it resulted in a positive correlation, but it is unclear from the summary I read if that is the number reported or a smaller positive correlation. I suspect the latter. This article about the study also left out the difference between the European and American data and results. For Americans, three drinks was the point where the numbers no longer provided a benefit, probably because Americans are more likely to drink all of it at once and without food, rather than with meals.
Backwoods Cough Medicine.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod up parent (Score:2, Interesting)
This would not just apply to alcohol. If there was a study on Caffine, I would want the abstainers not to have chosen to refrain. Why? if the caffine leaves them feeling bad enough to quit they are already tangebly different than the average person.
Different types of alcohol! So which one is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
As I understand it, and I have full confidence in the Slashdot crowd to let me know if I'm wrong, red wine alcohol comes from the sugar fermentation of red grapes and contains quite a bit of healthy anti-oxidants. White wine, on the other hand, contains far fewer anti-oxidants and therefore does not have the health benefits of red wine. In fact, the anti-oxidants entry on Wikipedia also makes this claim. Conversely, the alcohol in harder drinks like whiskey is grain-based alcohol that generally has little health benefits, not including its ability to wipe out the weaker brain cells.
Friends of mine who are very much into drinking and partying have said from their own experience that the alcohol buzz from sources like grapes is vastly different and impacts them differently than the grain alcohol in harder drinks. (Yes, I'm aware that the smart-ass responses to that almost write themselves.)
But even a friend's mom who is a registered nurse got on his case one time when he got plastered from a combination of wine and spirits, claiming that, "Mixing those types of alcohol together is incredibly dangerous!"
Again, as one not involved in the medical profession I can only make suppositions on all of this. But it does bother me how reports like this have a tendency of throwing around the generic term "alcohol" as though it encompasses all drinks when that should not necessarily be the case.
Stay away from that O2, it is a killer (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes pure alcohol is dangerous but MANY substances we depend upon are dangerous when consumed pure or in a too large a dose. You can even be poisoned by drinking to much water.
The simple fact is that living kills you. The entire process of living is killing you. The oxygen intake burns up your cells, but without it they would simply die as well.
Living is the balance between dying now and dying some point in the future. Yes you can stop yourselve from being slowly damaged by oxygen but the side effects will be rather severe.
Same with all these alcohol and other studies that say a dangerous substance is somehow also beneficial. The trick lies in finding the balance where the positive effects are stronger then the negative effects.
This is offcourse very hard because there are so many effects to take into consideration. Worse they also change. Say X extends your life by 10 years. That would also give the sideffects ten more years in wich to manifest itself. Put it like this, say that taking my new drug is guarenteed to make your heart explode. Bad right? At some point past your 600th birthday. Ah, not so bad now right?
Could alcohol induced cancer only manifest itself in people who would have been death anyway if they hadn't taken alcohol? It is not just a case of what disease alcohol causes but also wether you would have even been alive to get them in the first place without alcohol. Except offcourse it is not about YOU but about Mr Statistic, you know the dude, the one with 2.6 childeren.
Re:Stats 101... (Score:4, Interesting)
Correlation does not imply causation.
Actually, correlation frequently implies causation. Much of science is looking at correlations and testing to find corresponding causations. Correlation does not necessarily imply a given causation. You are correct in so much as this study does not provide any proof that drinking will cause you to live longer. It was, however, normalized for several other strong correlations, such as medical conditions and dietary habits. If you're looking to live longer, drinking a few drinks a day may help or it may not. I think it's worth a shot, but I was going to do it anyway.
Re:Define "drink" (Score:2, Interesting)
The best example of such intervention is Bulgarian Mavrud. This is a relic grape which has survived the filoxera pandemic and is notorious for producing 4-5 piss vintages useable only for vinegar followed by one year which it produces the "nectar of the gods". Great wine, if you do not mind the really high alcohol content which in some years ran into the 16-17%. A vintage from one of those rare years could stay for 20-40 years in a cellar before starting to oxidise into vinegar without any extra preservatives. And it was a phenomenal wine. Was. Till recently. Now the vineyards which grow it have deployed Australian technology. As a result they produce moderate quality supermarket shelf style rancid horsepiss arrested at 13% which I find utterly undrinkable. It makes a good export to Great Britain though.
I can continue with other similar examples from Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc where Australian tech has been used to make wines "behave". As a result wines that produce 1-2 good or even phenomenal vintages per decade and crap for the rest now produce supermarket quality piss every year. As one of my italian collegues says "Ribena Wine".
... or it could be olive oil.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Truth is that people's lives are a combination of so many factors that singling out one factor is pretty pointless.
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, studies like this go back at least 30 years, and their results are a bit more complex.
The first big one I remember reading about was in the mid 70's, in the UK. It was a massive "data dredging" study of medical records, looking for things correlated (negatively or positively) with long life.
They reported that the strongest correlation was with "moderate alcohol consumption", which was about the same as in this study - 3 or 4 drinks per day, where "drink" was somewhat fuzzily defined as whatever the records listed as a "glass". They reported that drunkards didn't do so well, but teetotalers didn't do a lot better, and the ones who lived longest were those who regularly consumed moderate amounts of alcohol.
They did have a few more details. Those who drank only distilled booze didn't benefit as much as those who drank beer or wine (but they did benefit). They had weak data showing that red wines and dark beers were somewhat better for health than the lighter-colored varieties. They said that drinking with meals was better for you than just drinking, and they didn't recommend having all four of your drinks all at once.
Since then, quite a lot of research has given us a lot more information. Recently, studies have uncovered some of the reasons for the benefits of red wines, including the fact that not all red wines show the benefits. But again, further research is needed.
My wife works with medical data a lot, and is constantly finding more studies of the effects of alcohol. She rather likes telling people about the latest benefits that have been discovered. And she comments that we just don't drink enough around our house. A few years back, she worked with a researcher who liked to tell people that his studies had been unable to find an upper bound to the amount of alcohol that was beneficial. He would add that he was just studying the effect of ethanol on the circulatory system, which is apparently not at all damaged by heavy drinking. He would also say that he couldn't comment on the effect on other parts of the body such as the liver; that was other people's research.
Anyway, it's a complex subject, biologically, and the research isn't nearly done. But there have been a lot of studies, and we can fairly firmly recommend a glass or two of beer or wine with every meal. Well, maybe not with breakfast, as you might just decide to go back to sleep, so have that one later in the evening instead. Dark wines and beers are somewhat better than light, but if you don't like them, drink something you do like and don't worry about it.
Re:Polyphenols and wine (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that polyphenols might not have a positive effect; only that it's likely small compared to the positive effect of alcohol.
Re:Legal age (Score:1, Interesting)
I hate those bitches. They're the one group with whom a reasoned debate is not possible, and to even attempt to do so hurts your cause in the eyes of the underinformed. You can't beat a woman who has lost a child.
Look at how Cindy Sheehan was a media darling when she was doing her thing.
LK
Soviets did it (Score:1, Interesting)
Reportedly, it caused signing the Internationale and chargingly blindly at the enemy.
Re:Alcoholism different from drinking in moderatio (Score:3, Interesting)