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.""
Define "drink" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Funny)
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Too late.
*ducks*
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Informative)
They defined a drink as 10 grams of ethanol, which would make the appropriate amount for americans something like 1 tumbler of scotch, I believe (assuming 120 proof). If someone cares to do a more scientific conversion, rather than the half-assed one I just put together, we're looking for what content of scotch contains 30 grams of ethanol.
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Informative)
So Americans should probably interpret the limit as *3* drinks per day for men.
Actually, from the somewhat better article on this study that I read, they found a difference between European and American drinking that placed 3, 10g drinks as the high end cutoff for Americans and 6 as the cutoff for Europeans. They theorized this was due to the differences in the way Americans and Europeans drink, specifically if you were drinking small amounts with meals all day, or drinking all of it at once without food.
So you should probably change that to "2" drinks per day, for men, unless you're drinking them more dispersed over the course of the day and with food.
Re:Define "drink" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Informative)
A standard "drink", as defined in the US, is 0.6 oz of ethenol [wikipedia.org]. We will assume 43% alcohol by volume (the content of my favorite Scotch, Glenmorangie 18 year).
At 43% ABV, a "standard drink" of Glenmorangie would be 0.6/0.43 = 1.40 oz, or slightly less than a shot (1.5 oz). 0.6 oz of ethanol weighs about 14g, assuming a specific gravity of 0.789 for ethanol [wikipedia.org]. Calculations below:
(0.6 oz) * (29.57 ml/oz) * (0.789 g/cm^3) * (1 ml/cm^3) = 14.0 grams
So with a drink allowance of 4 drinks at 10g of ethanol each would allow you to have *almost* three Scotches, by American drink size standards. In the UK, where a standard drink is only 10 ml of ethanol, you could have five drinks. Whether this amount is more or less than what you actually pour for yourself is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Funny)
btw, when I start to see 2 slashdot homepages on my screen at the same time, thats when my body tells me I have the perfect amount of alcohol.
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Funny)
Either that or you finally got xinerama working.
Re:Define "drink" (Score:5, Funny)
Right. So it's technically correct to take a sip of 12 year old single malt and say, 'That's good shit.'
Re:Define "drink" (Score:4, Funny)
If you want obscure, my calculations say that the limit comes out to about one third of a firkin of ale per fortnight.
Cheers!
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Well, as the article pointed out, proof was originally defined by soaking gunpowder with the liquor. 100 proof was the weakest solution that still allowed the gunpowder to ignite. Nobody can deny that that's just a cool way to define a measurement.
The US standard is a more scientific simplification of that somewhat impreci
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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:Define "drink" (Score:5, Funny)
I always thought this was bizarre. A 12 oz beer just does not look right in a pint glass. It's like hot dogs coming 6 to a pack and buns 8 to a pack. Madness.
Things radically change (Score:5, Funny)
For starters, you wake up in bed with a stranger not knowing how either got there...
Offtopic, but amusing (Score:5, Funny)
Three hours later I was standing in the hall with no shirt, after being thrown out of my own room by a still-drunk girl who was convinced that I'd sneaked into her room in the night! One of my floormates called campus security (probably for their own amusement), and the whole thing ended up being written up (in garbled form) as a security report in the campus paper.
Not only did I not get breakfast, poor girl was so humiliated by the whole incident that she avoided me until I transferred 18 months later.
I think the moral is either: Don't drink the punch, or Let sleeping geeks lie.
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And, likely, a bucket.
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Or lock your door.
... 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:Things radically change (Score:4, Funny)
Legal age (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Legal age (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Legal age (Score:5, Insightful)
How does it count as "freedom" if you restrict the the things that people are allowed to make light of?
Re:Legal age (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Legal age (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyways, the problem with the age limit on alcohol consumption is that it gives teens/young adults the impression that drinking excessively is a mature thing to do; most people I have met who have drank from a young age tend to see excessive drinking in a completely different light than those who get to drink when they're 18-21.
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Re:Legal age (Score:5, Informative)
I think the US is the only country in the world with such a strict view on drinking, and it does not help. There is no less drinking amongst the youth in the US as in europe, and I just cannot understand where this phobia comes from. Maybe some after effect of the prohibition in the 1930s?
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Sadly, no, the US is not the only country with "such a strict view on drinking", several countries have much stricter views (e.g., Saudi Arabia.)
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Re:Legal age (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll assume that you don't know the answer to that since you're apparently not from the US and thus probably didn't have to take multiple years of US History in school at every level. Basically, 500 years ago, Europe wasn't so hot in the religious freedom department. So all the various groups that believed slightly differently (and I really mean only slightly differently in the grand scheme of things -- we are talking about 100 different flavors of Christianity here) couldn't practice freely, or at least not as freely as they wanted to. Consequences ranged from annoyance level to death. So there was all this land over here in the Americas, and not a hell of a lot of established bureaucracy to regulate it, and about a zillion separate groups decided, "Hey, let's go over there where we can do what we please, and we'll build a new, ideal society! We've thought about this a lot, and we think we have the correct interpretation of the Bible and that nobody else does, so once we run things according to the real Godly principles we've discovered, everything will be totally schweet and kick ass." So they did. Net result? Not only were the real religious zealots (the ones who not only took religion seriously, but so seriously that the established variation of Christianity wasn't good enough) siphoned out of Europe, but they got together and established entire (small) societies based on fairly extreme principles. So they were extreme to start with, and then they put themselves in a situation that encouraged extremeness.
Now, all of these Utopian religious societies really didn't last. As Bruce Cockburn said, "Let's hear a laugh for the man of the world / Who thinks he can make things work / Tried to build a New Jerusalem / And ended up with New York." However, although the societies didn't work and people ended up going more mainstream, they still had a major, lasting effect, because American life continued to be pretty seriously religious even after the initial influx of religiously-motivated colonizers. First there was The Great Awakening, basically a series of revivals which swept the nation and pretty much permanently altered society. It was, if I remember right, a global event, but it pretty much centered on the US. As if that wasn't enough, there was a Second Great Awakening 100-ish years later.
The net result of it these days is that American Christianity is somewhat of its separate thing, in the same sense that Catholicism is different from the Eastern Orthodox Church. Obviously, they all basically believe in the same things, but they don't think about it in just the same way. For example, American Christianity has tended to have a strong current of evangelicalism. It also has tended to be a little bit anti-intellectual, which has largely as a result of a reaction against The Enlightenment.
So yeah, it's related to Prohibition. But only in the sense that both are part of a much larger trend. I have in my desk drawer a pencil with an American flag design on it and the words "LOYAL TEMPERANCE LEGION / We Stand for Total Abstinence". I got it from my grandmother's house, and I believe my grandparents got it from my grandfather's mother, who was very active in the temperance movement. It was at one time a very mainstream thing to do. And it's not completely nonexistent either -- they, in fact, still exist and have a web site [wctu.org].
So basically, Puritanism is still alive and well in the culture in the US. There are plenty of people with more moderate views, but there is a certain balance, and both have influence.
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Re:Legal age (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no reason why 21 should be the drinking age when 18 is the age of majority.
People always spout some bullshit about responsibility, but the studies show that people starting to drink at 21 is more harmful than people drinking earlier. When people are younger, they have more parental supervision. They learn how to drink responsibly. When someone is 21 and out on their own, they have no parents to answer to and can do pretty much what they want.
LK
Riddle me this... (Score:2)
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Re:Legal age (Score:5, Informative)
States basically have the choice of discriminating against 18-20 year old adults and going bankrupt.
LK
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The ACLU takes an active position against the individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.
http://www.aclu.org/police/gen/14523res20020304.ht ml [aclu.org]
They claim to be neutral, but their officially stated position is not:
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain m
Re:Legal age (Score:5, Funny)
I guess it makes sense too, first you have sex, got (someone) pregnant, then you drink and smoke to numb your pain in making such a stupid mistake, and finally at 21, you resort to gambling to satisfy the needs for cigaratte, alcohol and your kid's school fees.
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The one that gets me is that here in the UK (and probably many other places too), you can have sex at 16, but you have to be 18 to rent a video of OTHER PEOPLE having sex.
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"If you're not supposed to drink and drive, why not restrict alchohol to those too young to drive?"
It would solve a few things, eh?
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Unless they've changed things, you can still drink on based if you are under 21.
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When you enroll to the military, you are NOT allowed to die. That is considered damaging military property.
Lower the drinking age, raise the driving age. (Score:2)
some reason Congress decided to raise the drinking age to 21, and do nothing with the driving age. (Yes I know it was state legislatures that did it, but it was essentially a MAJOR push by the US Congress by removing highway funds if they didn't).
Frankly I think this was backwards. Peoples first experience with alcohol tends to be underage drinking (away from the protection of parents), or after they
Re:military & drinking (Score:5, Funny)
Fair enough. In the Philippines, American soldiers do not check the age of Philippino girls...
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Re:Legal age (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Legal age (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Legal age (Score:5, Funny)
and the bartender said "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You gotta show some id to prove you're 21, and you can't all use the same one!"
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Not all of us - only the wankers in charge (and those wankers supporting those in charge - who, come think of it, are the biggest wankers of all.)
Four drinks a day? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I don't hink I'd consider four drinks every day to be "moderate" drinking.
Re:Four drinks a day? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Four drinks a day? (Score:4, Funny)
But if it's a work day, you don't have very much time to get all those drinks down.
Wait, you don't drink at work? Insane. Our office manager picked up a couple cases of microbrew just today and stuck them in the fridge for us. We used to have to stock the fridge ourselves at my last employer. Man I love the computer industry.
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Re:Four drinks a day? (Score:5, Informative)
Shotgunning four drinks one after the other (binging, basically) is one thing. Drinking four drinks over the course of a six hour evening is something else. I'm kind of surprised at the number as well. Wikipedia's page on cirrhosis states that "There is great variability in the amount of alcohol needed to cause cirrhosis (as little as 3-4 drinks a day in some men and 2-3 in some women)." This seems to put 3-4 drinks as a LOWER bound on the danger zone. There may be people (quite a few people in fact) who can tolerate more than that.
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Re:Four drinks a day? (Score:5, Funny)
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Can't drink (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 bet
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.
The things i do (Score:5, Funny)
Makes me happy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Makes me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
Huzzah! (Score:2)
I am INVINCIBLE! (Score:2)
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My rule... (Score:2)
So let me get this straight (Score:2)
and half-starve myself,
and stay out of the sunlight,
and smoke copious amounts of pot,
and drink lots of espresso and tea...
actually fuck it, I don't care how long I live, whatever time I have will be really goddammed fun.
Worldwide Recommendations... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.drinkingandyou.com/site/uk/biggy.htm [drinkingandyou.com]
breaking news! (Score:2, Insightful)
906,000 people lived! (Score:2)
That's 906,000 people who didn't die! Pretty much 9 out of 10. I like those odds!
Reduce chance of death? (Score:2, Funny)
The old correlation--causation confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
But unfortunately the correlation may not imply causation. i.e. people who live longer drink more, but not vice-versa.
Lotsa possible ways to spoil things.
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Backwoods Cough Medicine.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahem... ANY cause? (Score:2)
Obligatory Simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)
Stats 101... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
18 percent? (Score:2)
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.
As a homebrewer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Polyphenols and wine (Score:4, Insightful)
Finding out who paid for these studies and the publicizing of their results, is another story... With alcohol and wine lobbies strongly rooted in the french political life, and recently getting into academic funding, you should always follow the money before you make your mind about these studies...
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Self-selected non-drinkers cause of bias? (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing it's always important to consider when looking at the health consequences of a human-controllable factor such as drinking alcohol is: some people may make a decision about how much alcohol to drink and this decision is based on a reason related to their current health.
For example, those who are already unwell or have a chronic condition may well decide to avoid alcohol completely, or have this recommended to them by their doctors. This means that the future outcomes recorded for "those who do not drink, or who drink very little" can be biased to some extent by the fact that they are already at a higher risk of disease or death. Getting this sort of bias measured is incredibly difficult.
If this happens, then you get a mortality relationship which seems to be telling you: drinking almost nothing has a modest mortality rate (because it includes all those who have been avoid alcohol); a small amount of alcohol, consumed by largely health-conscious people leads to a lower mortality rate; then higher levels of alcohol lead to higher mortality rates. At face value, this suggests that "drinking a small amount of alcohol is good for you". While this may be true, you have to be very careful in interpreting the results.
Basically, this boils down to the difference between: some people get ill or die because they drink a lot, and some people drink very little because they are already ill.
Re:Make up your mind (Score:4, Insightful)
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Drunks don't die in crashes, they kill other people.
Suposedly this has something to do with thm being more relaxed. (admitedly, there is a good chance this is smiply an urban legend, as I can find no data for or against it)
Re:waste of a study (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alcoholism different from drinking in moderatio (Score:3, Interesting)