67% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
jgrewe said:This doesn't affect me, I'm not Canadian.
That stuff you guys call beer doesn't really count anyway.
My neighbor is in the 400 Club for cholesterol, her doctor instructed her to have one glass of red wine a day.
Mndsm said:In reply to Beer Baron :
I had that problem when I worked at the brewery.
"How often do you drink"
"Just about every day"
.........had to REALLY break that one down before I was sent to rehab.
"Dr., I need to taste beer at 11am because that is the scientifically optimum time to do sensory analysis."
Fortunately my current Dr. seems to get it and is just like, "Let's try to keep things at or under the average of 2/day for you as a man."
I just did a little math and I'm down from an average high of about 7 drinks a night to less than 1.5 now. But I'm making up for it by cooking everything in bacon fat.
*thinks back to the decade spent drinking a (minimum of a) gallon of beer plus shots every night*
Eh, berkeley it. Rather die young and have fun stories to tell.
I have the whole 10 months of E36 M3ty weather to not drink, so I'll still enjoy my summer weekends drinking till the beer is gone. It averages out.
Beer Baron said:In addition to the safe amount of alcohol, the timespan it's consumed in matters a lot too.
7 drinks a week is very different if you consume them all in one night, vs if you have one every day.
I suspect that even over the course of a day matters. If you pound three shots of liquor back to back, I imagine that's very different than drinking that amount of beer gradually over the course of 8 hours.
(Trying to explain how much I drink to a Dr. is weird. I don't drink like a regular person.)
Pretty much. Giving the liver plenty of time to break materials down, lack of pressure changes striking major vessels like the portal veins (obviously if you drink a ton, your arteries and veins have to account for the extra fluid) and plenty of water and food for digestion all matter. Alcoholism kills livers not simply because excess is bad- it also does it because the liver has to filter and it has no recovery or resting period. We see the same with (extreme excess) fatty foods, in the aptly named Fatty Liver Disease.
ShawnG said:Appleseed said:67% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
4 out of 5 people enjoy gang rape.
Do the math...the average person has one testicle and one ovary.
RX Reven' said:ShawnG said:Appleseed said:67% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
4 out of 5 people enjoy gang rape.
Do the math...the average person has one testicle and one ovary.
Technically, there's one boob for each of us.
RevRico said:*thinks back to the decade spent drinking a (minimum of a) gallon of beer plus shots every night*
Eh, berkeley it. Rather die young and have fun stories to tell.
I have the whole 10 months of E36 M3ty weather to not drink, so I'll still enjoy my summer weekends drinking till the beer is gone. It averages out.
No fun story ever started with a salad.
In reply to Beer Baron :
Explaining beer was for breakfast (I was usually bottling by 9am and we had to test every keg obv) was a fun one. Was not uncommon to have a caffeinated beverage, a glass of water, and a beer going at the same time.
I looked into this study a little and it seems to be incredibly hyperbolic. Fair warning, I like drinking and thought this study was stupid before I ever looked into it, so expect a little bias in my post. I realize that drinking alcohol isn't healthy, but I really doubt the three or four drinks I have each week is going to cause huge problems for me. The last guidelines were published in 2011 and recommended no more than 15 drinks a week for men and 10 for women. Has the science really advanced so much in the last 12 years that we're now being told to drink no more than 2 drinks a week? I really doubt it.
The big thing they've been touting is that they we looked at the evidence from almost 6000 studies and the evidence is clear. What the press releases fail to mention is that two people looked through those 5915 studies and threw out 5899 of them using a subjective process and used the 16 that they "considered most appropriate to inform the development of updated Low-Risk Alcohol Drinking Guideline". They threw out any articles that looked at just one type of alcohol, so a study that said "one glass of red wine a day helps your heart" was tossed because people who drink wine might also drink beer! Next they tossed out any studies that didn't reflect the multiculturalism of Canada, "For example, a systematic review that focused exclusively on people living in India would be excluded because it does not reflect the multicultural context of people living in Canada." Using a points system, they upgraded or downgraded articles based on criteria like Imprecision (downgraded by 1 or 2 points) and Large Effect Size (upgraded by 1 or 2 points), so a study with very imprecise data that showed a huge effect size could be graded the same as a study with very precise data showing little effect. Anyways, the results sound a lot less damning if they say that they looked at the evidence from 16 studies and created a mathematical model to try to fit the data from those results and our model shows that you shouldn't drink. The quotes I used and my info came from their explanation of how they screened the peer reviewed papers: CCSA-LRDG-Evidence-Review-Technical-Report
From the actual study, here and the risk analysis report here things get interesting. (Someone please correct me if I'm misinterpreting something here, I am on my second porter). They define a premature death as 17.5 "years of life lost" (YLL) against an average lifespan of 75 years (this is a standard measure used in studies around the world). They base their consumption recommendations on what would cause 17.5 YLL per 1000 lifetimes (75 years each), so they are using recommendations to limit us to 17.5 years of early death out of 75,000 years, which works out to an average of 6 days per person! They threw out the idea of using 17.5 YLL per 100 lifetimes because obviously alcohol killing someone on average at 74 years and 10 months instead of them living to 75 years is an epic disaster! It's much better to limit the risk of alcohol killing you 6 days before your 75th birthday. But that never gets mentioned on the news, we just hear that alcohol is killing everyone super early.
Next, their model actually shows that a few grams of alcohol per day (a quarter of drink) actual increase people's lifespan, but they don't mention that in their press releases because they chose to ignore that part of the graph because their error bars are pretty big and cross the null hypothesis (the effect on deaths was negative, but their error bars extended into the positive) so it warrants much more study to determine if it's real or not. They don't mention that the error bars at their recommendation level are still pretty big and also cross the null hypothesis (effect was positive but the error bars extend into the negative) and they also don't explain a stair step increase in their model at around 2 drinks per day. My guess is the data from their 16 studies isn't enough to really create a decent model, but that could just be my bias coming through.
So I think these new guidelines are stupid and are more ideologically driven than being based on any real science which I guess shouldn't be too surprising based on the fact that the mission of the charity that put them out is to decrease substance abuse in Canada, and if most people are following their current guidelines they risk getting their funding cut off because they then serve no purpose (The Canadian federal government is their major donor, about 20% comes from other sources).
In other news, part of Canada today decided to decriminalize heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, meth and morphine! Yay progress! Link
Appleseed said:67% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Here is one statistic that I will make up on the spot and stand behind.
100% of deaths are caused by birth. And yet, we insist on not stopping the endless massacre. Makes you wonder.
Probably going to be some E36 M3 happening between point "A" and point "B".
On the grand scale of eternity, 10 or even 40 more years in the game is not really going to matter is it? Grab some gusto cause it is a long ride after.
In reply to Schmidlap :
I am sad that I only have one upvote to give.
I believe that the researchers would have better to lose their bias first and poised their regressive analysis as Canada vs the world if they wanted to skew people to quit drinking. But we all can't cheat death.
In reply to Schmidlap :
Thank you for actually looking into that.
It sounds like a case of, "When we review all the literature looking at the risks of alcohol, we find alcohol to be risky."
Which sounds equivalent to, "After reviewing case studies of traffic accidents and automobile fatalities, we find driving any distance to be unsafe."
Schmidlap said:Next, their model actually shows that a few grams of alcohol per day (a quarter of drink) actual increase people's lifespan...
As someone familiar with the cultural history of alcohol, I would have actualy hypothesized this to be true.
Alcohol is sanitary and preservative. Mildly alcoholic things have fewer pathogens. It is very common in nature. Not only can you not avoid lightly fermented fruits and grains, but they would be preferable to one spoiled by other microbes. Non-human animals seek these out, and our ancestors would have evolved to do so as well.
It would make sense that we evolved to be able to safely consume low levels of alcohol regularly. Such that these levels would at least not be harmful, if not actually beneficial.
The alcohol content of these would have been much lower than modern commercially produced alcoholic beverages though. With modern water sanitation, alcohol production is for recreation, not survival. But we could probably spend all day hydrating ourselves with 1-2% abv near-beer.
In reply to Schmidlap :
You did what I started doing but ran out of time... and interest. If you live here you learn that there are a lot of agenda driven organizations and they know how to use the media to their advantage. That E36 M3 was all over the news and talk radio here for a solid week, if not a little more. It's all but forgotten now, though
The study I'd like to see done is why people have the need for alcohol based drinks at all?
Many of the posters in this thread seem to HAVE to have an alcoholic drink every day.....the why is what interests me.
I tried to keep up with the boys when I was in college, but all it did was make me sick, and I haven't had any since my first year there. Don't miss it, and I sure have had a lot more money to spend on things I do enjoy....like my project cars.
I equate alcohol and tobacco use (along with other drugs) as a complete waste of money and time.......but that's me and I recognize others feel differently. But I have to say, there's nothing I enjoy less than a booze breathed loud mouthed drunk yelling in my face - whether happy or angry.
In reply to MiniDave :
Some taste good and are a great social lubricant. Plus they are nice to relax after a long day.
Personally I would guess I average 3-5 drinks a week but some weeks I will have none and some weeks more depending on social events. Rarely to the point of intoxication (basically twice a year Dragoncon and and an ultimate frisbee tournament). I might have 1 or 2 a week by myself.
You'll need to log in to post.