Heart Association Revives Theory That Light Drinking May Be Good For You 96
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For a while, it seemed the notion that light drinking was good for the heart had gone by the wayside, debunked by new studies and overshadowed by warnings that alcohol causes cancer. Now the American Heart Association has revived the idea in a scientific review that is drawing intense criticism, setting off a new round of debate about alcohol consumption. The paper, which sought to summarize the latest research and was aimed at practicing cardiologists, concluded that light drinking -- one to two drinks a day -- posed no risk for coronary disease, stroke, sudden death and possibly heart failure, and may even reduce the risk of developing these conditions.
Controversy over the influential organization's review has been simmering since it was published in the association's journal Circulation in July. Public health groups and many doctors have warned on the basis of recent studies that alcohol can be harmful even in small amounts. Groups like the European Heart Network and the World Heart Federation have stressed that even modest drinking increases the odds of cardiovascular disease. "It says in all our guidelines right now, 'If you don't drink, don't start.' There's not enough evidence to suggest conclusively that it prevents heart disease," said Dr. Mariell Jessup, the chief science and medical officer at the heart association, adding that the review was not meant to serve as a guideline and that the group's advice to patients has not changed.
Critics argue that suggesting any heart-health benefits from alcohol is dangerous given its well-documented risks, and they accuse the heart association of selectively weighing studies. They also say a past tie to the alcohol industry by one author should have disqualified him from participating.
"The cardiovascular benefits of moderate drinking are questionable at best," said Dr. Elizabeth Farkouh, an internist and alcohol researcher. "But even if there was a benefit, there are so many other ways to reduce cardiovascular risk that don't come with an associated cancer risk."
The new review's conclusion is also at odds with the CDC's guidance on alcohol, which notes that "even moderate drinking may increase your risk of death and other alcohol-related harms, compared to not drinking." It also seems to diverge from the heart association's diet and lifestyle recommendation to consume "limited or preferably no alcohol," along with its 2023 statement that recent research suggests there is "no safe level of alcohol use."
Controversy over the influential organization's review has been simmering since it was published in the association's journal Circulation in July. Public health groups and many doctors have warned on the basis of recent studies that alcohol can be harmful even in small amounts. Groups like the European Heart Network and the World Heart Federation have stressed that even modest drinking increases the odds of cardiovascular disease. "It says in all our guidelines right now, 'If you don't drink, don't start.' There's not enough evidence to suggest conclusively that it prevents heart disease," said Dr. Mariell Jessup, the chief science and medical officer at the heart association, adding that the review was not meant to serve as a guideline and that the group's advice to patients has not changed.
Critics argue that suggesting any heart-health benefits from alcohol is dangerous given its well-documented risks, and they accuse the heart association of selectively weighing studies. They also say a past tie to the alcohol industry by one author should have disqualified him from participating.
"The cardiovascular benefits of moderate drinking are questionable at best," said Dr. Elizabeth Farkouh, an internist and alcohol researcher. "But even if there was a benefit, there are so many other ways to reduce cardiovascular risk that don't come with an associated cancer risk."
The new review's conclusion is also at odds with the CDC's guidance on alcohol, which notes that "even moderate drinking may increase your risk of death and other alcohol-related harms, compared to not drinking." It also seems to diverge from the heart association's diet and lifestyle recommendation to consume "limited or preferably no alcohol," along with its 2023 statement that recent research suggests there is "no safe level of alcohol use."
Drug week for the new year (Score:2)
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Ketamine and heroin, even their addictions are lame, those are pretty stupid for supposedly smart people. At least have a coke habit.
Maybe they should try some MDMA and claw back some of that empathy they fried with money.
Nonprofit needs headlines and donations (Score:2)
You shut off a regular self-promotional advertisement for the Heart Association can't ever weigh in on alcohol consumption by press release in the media.
The Heart Association will have less free headlines seeking donation, less work for its marking team to do and less time for its "scientific experts" to build credentials.
And, there are several million people who drink a small sip of wine during religious service communion every Sunday in the USA, so the Heart Association would not want negative attention (
Can someone chime in from the UK nonprofits? (Score:2)
It would be informative if someone from the UK, knowledgeable in nonprofits (not for profit) organizations, add information on how they are coping with the national focus shifting from older steady well-known issues to a focus on new national issues (migration, drug use and gangs).
Is there a decline in media impact score for old-line UK nonprofits and how they market the issue, message and seek donations?
A second aspect is how is the shift in budget from social spending, including government funding for non
It's probably research affected by undue influence (Score:5, Interesting)
Alcohol consumption is a highly popular entertainment activity in the US.
The last thing anybody wants to be told Is an activity they highly enjoy is a danger to them in ANY amount.
Drinking lightly or in moderation is not enough to mitigate the risk.
Because of this; there is likely an Undue influence by people who drink within the organization.
The first stage of grief is denial, and attempt to rationalize a way that it isn't true;
Even if you are a researcher, or a person in charge of studies and papers, and
you should know better.
My immediate suspicion is that there are people conducting research or decisions for that organization who are at that stage.
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The thing is, there is no definitive way to know how your particular genetics will respond to a particular thing.
In the same way someone who smokes lives to 100 or how some people are capable of weighing over 500 pounds without dying. Or how some animals can metabolize things that would kill other organisms.
It's the same reason diets "don't work" because any diet that will benefit you will have to be tailored to your specific genetics and we don't have the technology or knowledge for that. We can only make
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My suspicion is you had a drink or 2 last night.
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my suspicion is you are detached from normal society
Exactly how many drinks did you have last night? I'm gonna guess a few too many.
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zero for a year, my things are tea and dark chocolae. Tell me the evils of caffeine or theobromines, there are plenty of groups that wan to eliminate consumption of those.
Your reaction rather proves my point.
I've not heard of many organisations being anti-tea.
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No, they're part of normal society that pushes their wishes and ideals as truths. Science is a weird niche branch of philosophy that says that's a bad way to generate knowledge.
That's hard enough for trained scientists to do never mind the masses. So the masses politicize papers with conclusions they don't like. Notice most of the arguments aren't about the data, they're something along the lines of "idiots won't understand this so it's dangerous to publish."
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Theres actually a better reason to drink in moderation.
Because its fun.
And life is too fucking short and you only get it once, and living it in misery is not fucking worth it. If my life is 5 years shorter and 5 times as fun, well, seems like a good trade off to me.
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living it in misery is not fucking worth it
If your life is a misery to the point that only drinking can help, then you need to fix the circumstances of your life that're making you miserable, and not with alcohol.
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Theres actually a better reason to drink in moderation.
That is perfectly fine to understand that there may be a risk, even an unreasonable or significant risk, and to assume that risk anyway because it's fun.
There are also people who drink who seek validation for their conduct as if they are not taking a risk that can be a source of bias, and those people would include researchers Or people attempting to summarize researchers.
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The bourbon industry wants you to drink as well. Turns out trade wars are bad for business and thus need Americans to make up for the fact the world isn't buying American.
Sounds like BS paid-for spin (Score:5, Informative)
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...made by virtue signalling goody-goodies.
And medical researchers based on decadal-length studies of high quality.
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It doesn't take much more than 2 a day to start seriously damaging your organs. Plenty of people have killed their livers with less than a six pack per day. It's the consistency of doing it over long periods that seems really damaging. Drinking on vacation probably won't kill you. (Unless you drown or something)
Here is the thing (Score:3)
You cannot actually avoid alcohol. A lot of foods contain it naturally. Hence it is always a question of what amount does what and not one of completely staying away from it.
Re: Here is the thing (Score:2)
A lot of foods contain heavy metals, but it's still better to refrain from chugging mercury to wash down your lead sandwich.
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This is a BS distinction. Pure Elemental mercury in its liquid form has low absorption, but it is still highly poisonous and a major hazard.
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I see you failed to understand my point.
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You cannot actually avoid alcohol. A lot of foods contain it naturally.
This is as dumb as claiming you can't avoid Arsenic; a lot of foods contain it naturally, so we shouldn't ban food companies from adding more.
You absolutely can avoid Alcohol. Which is mainly defined as taking food or drink that deliberately contains ethyl Alcohol in significant quantities. Your failure to make fine distinctions between a 0.2% of trace Alcohols within one's diet does not mean there isn't a distinction between trace Alc
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You cannot actually avoid alcohol. A lot of foods contain it naturally.
This is as dumb as claiming you can't avoid Arsenic; a lot of foods contain it naturally, so we shouldn't ban food companies from adding more.
That claim would be really dumb. That is why I did not made anything like it. You are pretty much functionally illiterate though of you read that in my statement.
What I actually said, which may have required the presence of two (!) working braincells to see is that a) the reference value is not zero and b) other things besides drinking alcohol have an influence.
In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
New Years! (Score:2)
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Whoo hoo! Happy New Year! *Grabs the whiskey bottle and cigar and heads to watch fireworks.*
Lightweight. You need to grab the whiskey bottle, a gun, and then use the cigar to light fireworks!
I have a related theory. (Score:2)
Re: I have a related theory. (Score:1)
Drunks don't win fist fights and are terrible marksmen. Sober up.
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Re: I have a related theory. (Score:2)
Possibly, but only for a short time after those drinks - it gets worse after that.
A beta blocker would be more effective and longer lasting. Comes with a whole different list of side effects, sadly. Better not mix alcohol with BBs, though.
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actually the two best shooters in state pistol bullseye matches from our gun club had a couple drinks before, hand was steadier.
Pool is another game that having a wee nip makes for a better aim.
We get the prohibitionist puritans rearing their heads every few years, and their aim is one - ban all alcohol.
I find it difficult to believe that an occasional drink shortens one's lifespan. And at least in the USA, where we are conditioned to gobble pills and then gobble more pills to counter the side effects of the first pills - what is more, the number three cause of death is prescription drugs, legally prescribed. Yet we shit our c
More medical paternalism (Score:1)
Truth cannot be dangerous.
Misapprehension of the truth may well be dangerous, but truth by itself cannot hurt you.
It may well be the fact that a little booze is both good for the heart and horrible for everything else. These are cardiologists. Perhaps reporting their best estimate of heart stuff (with error bars) and letting people and their physicians make their own medical decisions without bringing out the censorship hammer is not a bad idea if the proffered alternative is more paternalism and obfuscatio
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Truth cannot be dangerous.
Misapprehension of the truth may well be dangerous, but truth by itself cannot hurt you.
It may well be the fact that a little booze is both good for the heart and horrible for everything else. These are cardiologists. Perhaps reporting their best estimate of heart stuff (with error bars) and letting people and their physicians make their own medical decisions without bringing out the censorship hammer is not a bad idea if the proffered alternative is more paternalism and obfuscation in the service of paternalism.
I wonder what th prohibitionists would do in earlier times, when alcoholic beverages were one way to avoid dying from impure water microorganisms, Have a heart attack after 50 years of consumption, or dying from dysentery tomorrow.
Re: More medical paternalism (Score:1)
Probably the same word games as now: a glass of 2% beer (the sort of stuff people drank during the times of cholera) is the same as chugging 80 proof Chinese Maotai by the bottle.
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Probably the same word games as now: a glass of 2% beer (the sort of stuff people drank during the times of cholera) is the same as chugging 80 proof Chinese Maotai by the bottle.
I would support them drinking straight water! 8^).
Moderation in all things is good.
Side note - the robins in our back yard are little partiers. There is a tree that they go after when its little yellow fruits ripen in the fall and ferment. They eat them and get really shit faced, and use our pond like a jacuzzi. A few have even passed out in the yard. It's like a big ol frat party.
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One of the family houses of my youth had a Brazilian pepper tree. Seasonally, when its little messy berries got ripe, birds of several species would visit then end up stumbling around in the yard and making strange noises for a couple of hours before recovering enough to fly away. I have holly bushes that get seasonal visits by noisy flocks of hungry migrating robins after the berries.
From what I've been told, it helps rid them of parasites too.
Re: More medical paternalism (Score:1)
A qualitative and/or binary statement in place of a quantitative statement. Typical sophistry.
At what concentration does alcohol make you lose water and at what concentration does it begin to have a significant sterilizing effect?
Bleach to the tune of 1 drop per liter (or thereabouts) sterilizes pond or rain water enough to make it safe but not enough to hurt you. For example.
Don't drink bleach is good advice. Don't drink untreated pond water is also good advice. But if you've got a jug of bleach and no tre
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"alcoholic beverages were one way to avoid dying from impure water microorganisms" But drinking alcohol makes you lose more water than you gain (by peeing), so it never replaced water.
And dysentery cause you to lose a lot more water, But hey, if you can drink sewage and not get sick, you have it made! ;^)
Oh lord (Score:3)
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I guess you don't read [who.int], have Google [sciencealert.com], or read peer-reviewed papers. [google.com] You can't even write complete sentences. How do you function dragging your knuckles everywhere? Is your life as a troll really that bad that you have nothing to offer?
I will write complete sentences. Did you know that prescription drugs kill 250 thousand Americans a year - Now let's hear your rant about that. https://www.prnewswire.com/new... [prnewswire.com]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
After the wife got hammered by legally prescribed, properly taken, and a number of relatives died from them - I perhaps find an occasional beer less intimidating than the pills Americans gobble like candy. Their side effect, the pills to counteract the side effect, then the poor outcomes.
And F
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There's no safe amount of EtOH intake because it causes cancer. Whatever tiny "benefits" might exist are offset by the harms.
Do you take any maintenance drugs? If you are worried that ethanol causes cancer, you really need to read the labels on them. Compromised immune systems, elevated cancer risk, all manner of problems in medicines people take - but yeah - you gonna die if you drink a beer.
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Oxygen also causes cancer.
My conspiracy theory (Score:2)
In normal times I wouldn't be moved to say this. But lately it seems common for the US administration to subvert people who practise law, law enforcement, science, medicine, etc for the purpose of political and economic gain. Also, the incidence of selling favourable legislation seems to have hit new heights - and often they don't even bother to hide the fact.
So when I put this finding by the American Heart Association in the context of declining sales of Kentucky (red state) bourbon - https://www.bbc.com/n [bbc.com]
Now this year (Score:2)
I don't want to catch anybody not drinking
-- Rule 4 ; The Philosophy Dept of the University of Woolloomooloo
Re: The cancer-causing risk is acetaldehyde (Score:1)
How interesting this occurs now... (Score:2)
It's pretty well known that alcohol consumption isn't nearly as fashionable with Gen Z as the previous generations, and makers are seeing the impact on their bottom line.
Muslims don't live longer (Score:5, Insightful)
If alcohol had a material impact on life span, you'd expect Muslim communities to have a longer life span. Which they don't.
Other factors, such as obesity, exercise, genetics, and access to health care, drown out whatever impact alcohol might have. So I plan to keep drinking.
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If you pick any one factor you can then say all the other ones drown it out. And so it's meaningless.
And what group are you comparing Muslims to? It has to be a group uniformly filled with drinkers, probably moderate to excessive. If that's not your comparison then I don't understand your point.
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If you pick any one factor you can then say all the other ones drown it out. And so it's meaningless.
And what group are you comparing Muslims to? It has to be a group uniformly filled with drinkers, probably moderate to excessive. If that's not your comparison then I don't understand your point.
The point stands. We are told on and off that Alcohol is killing us. It is similar to how vegans tell us that meat is killing us, We are told that fat is bad for us, while the sugar industry paid off researchers to claim that it was fat.
While there might be no double blind tests conducted under rigorous conditions (which is of course impossible) there should be averaging possible.
If you believe that any alcohol consumption will kill you, then never let anything with any alcohol in it enter your system
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The point does not stand. It's logically incoherent - as is yours. Nobody's saying any alcohol consumption will kill you. Your straw man is incorrect.
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If alcohol had a material impact on life span, you'd expect Muslim communities to have a longer life span. Which they don't.
In a single variable assumption you'd be correct. But it turns out that there are many variables and yes each of them very much can and do have a material impact on life span. If you think otherwise I suggest you take up smoking 20 packs a day. After all both life expectancy and smoking rates are higher in Europe so clearly curing your lungs with meat is the reason for that by your logic.
You're making a correlation and causation mistake just in a slightly more abstract way.
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curing your lungs with *smoke*
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This quote is from quora from a year ago. Makes a lot of sense to me.
The average life span of the Citizens of Muslim countries is less than what is average for the whole world. Only Qatar has the highest life expectancy among Muslim countries and it is ranked at 37th spot in the world. Countries that are ranked higher in life span than Qatar are all alcohol consuming countries.
Alcohol in moderation is not going to kill u. What will kill u is the heavy consumption of animal products. And Muslims consume lot
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The first paragraph is sort of reasonable, but fraught with confounders. The second is just making the original error but substituting the author's pet cause and adding some religious weirdness. Fortunately the exact same argument deals with it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The highest per capita meat consuming countries are non-muslim. The muslim countries are all mid tier except for a couple gulf states, including Qatar.
Lol. It's a big part of
Re:Muslims don't live longer (Score:4, Insightful)
If alcohol had a material impact on life span, you'd expect Muslim communities to have a longer life span. Which they don't.
Mormons do.
Of course there are other factors there. Married people live longer, and Mormons also have higher marriage and lower divorce rates, for one. They also don't smoke, which is clearly a big factor, and don't drink coffee (may or may not have any effect). On the other hand, they tend to have slightly higher obesity rates.
Are you comparing apples to apples though? (Score:2)
A lot of the Muslim countries have extreme poverty even worse than America because they never threw off their monarchies. Also having the rest of the world periodically stick their noses into their business so that they can get cheap oil doesn't help either...
I can tell you that the combination of beer and cigarettes killed my mother at a fairly early age. The mechanism is pre
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And its interesting that over 50% of male centenarians drink alcohol. And some of the oldest female centenarians drink also
Given that the typical rate of drinking alcohol is over 50%, that seems to suggest a negative correlation between drinking and longevity.
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If alcohol had a material impact on life span, you'd expect Muslim communities to have a longer life span. Which they don't.
LOL, do I have some news for you after living amongst Muslims for many years: They drink. And smoke. Very few are "true believers". Same as any other religion I suppose. Of course, they hide their drinking and smoking so others can not witness it, but when you walk into a police captain's house to visit the most well stocked liquor store in the country... you kind of become jaded.
Massive generalizations (Score:2)
When you look at the population of the planet, and the diversity in genetics, body habitus, pre-existing health issues, diet, nutrition, on and on, it makes you realize that these incredibly broad statements are almost pointless.
For example, here is just one study highlighting the genetic differences between Chinese and Koreans [nih.gov] in the USA when it comes to alcohol response and dependency.
That is just one study between two clearly identifiable ethnic groups that have measurable differences of aldehyde dehydro
Both good and bad for you (Score:2)
Like many foods, there are both good and bad effects of drinking. The Heart Association might be right that some alcohol is good for the heart, but that doesn't diminish the cancer risk. It seems odd that they seem to ignore that part, not to mention the many other health risks associated with alcohol.
You mean microdosing alcohol. (Score:1)
I spent a minute trying to figure out how you could consume photons in liquid form.
What fool writes a headline using word with as many multiple definitions as light along with the slang meaning of a common word.
Sorry for being a grammar police, but that was just confusing.
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I spent a minute trying to figure out how you could consume photons in liquid form.
Same! Well, not liquid form, maybe. I thought maybe they were talking about getting sun exposure.
I re-read the headline several times, before giving up and reading the summary. At least the first sentence mentioned alcohol, which is when the metaphorical light bulb began emitting metaphorical photons.
American Heart Association (Score:2)