In my lifetime virtually everything that was once good for you (wine, high grain diet, non-fat foods) is now a bad and vice versa (eggs, high fat - low carb foods).
And articles like this one have been appearing in some variation my entire life. My take away, long ago, is that nutrition is fundamentally complex and poorly understood topic and any extreme opinions are likely to be inverted.
On the topic of alcohol, one things that has really become clear to me, is how directly tied to my environment drinking is. I've always liked to have a beer with dinner, but whether or not that was my only drink or one of many has much less to do with my personal decisions and much more to do with my environment, and I've noticed the same goes for most people.
Many of us became pretty serious drinkers during the pandemic. As it eased up I never made the decision to drink less, I just naturally drank less.
Point being is that no only am I skeptical of the claims of what I should and should not consume, I'm skeptical of entirely how much agency I have to change what I should consume baring case where the impact is immediate.
I find takes like this to be true in the specific details but wildly wrong as a big picture takeaway. A lot of people are citing their favorite quotes here, so here's one of mine from the Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov:
>When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
So I think there's a relativity of wrong problem that you run into when suggesting it's all just so complex and leaving it at that.
I would nevertheless absolutely agree that nutrition science and communication around it has been disorganized, contradictory, and without much in the way of a north star or a reliable "vanguard" of communicators representing a firm consensus. I feel much better about public communication from, say, astrophysics, archeology, geology, etc. and I think there's a characteristic degree of stability of knowledge particular to each of those fields.
> So I think there's a relativity of wrong problem that you run into when suggesting it's all just so complex and leaving it at that.
The problem with talking about human variability is that everyone can be equally wrong just due to the natural distribution.
What if a 30% of people have metabolisms that work better with low-fat/high-carbs, 30% high-fat/low-carbs, and 40% are kinda just in the middle and don't care as long as macros are balanced? Depending on how your sample breaks down (or which group has the most lobbying capital when the rules are made), your nutrition guidance can flip flop, especially if the effects are subtle except over the long term. Without the ability to group them a priori, the results will be all over the place and may even be unstable depending on whose thumb is on the scale.
Psychiatry faces this problem but much worse. Tons of drugs do work, we just don't know which ones will work for which people so both the treatment protocol and the clinical trials are a complete mess.
Fundamentally, the human body seems to be an incredibly complex system that is far more dynamic, rapidly changing, and with far more unpredictable interactions than any of those other fields.
It's fascinating that, at least on some axes, we might know less about core processes in our own bodies than we probably have already ascertained about planetary motion or materials composition from millions of miles away.
> Point being is that no only am I skeptical of the claims of what I should and should not consume, I'm skeptical of entirely how much agency I have to change what I should consume baring case where the impact is immediate.
Can you elaborate on what you mean that you're skeptical of how much agency you have to change what you should consume? A common definition of addiction is that it is the inability to control your consumption. However, "I never made the decision to drink less, I just naturally drank less," doesn't sound anything like addiction.
I began drinking both more frequently and in increased amounts of alcohol during the pandemic, but for me, this didn't stop or ease up until I made a conscious decision to stop. For me, it was habitual. And with habit came increased tolerance.
To be clear, as an ex-smoker, I do believe we have agency in the cases where patterns are disruptive. Smoking tobacco got in the way of a range of activities, and I had to put in a serious effort to curb this behavior. Certainly drinkers who find their drinking interferes with other things are able to change their habits. Though even this is probably more environmental than not. I haven't smoked in 20+ years but I also no longer know any smokers. I'm not sure I would be a non-smoker today if smoking rates were closer to what they were in the 1950s. Similarly I have known people with problematic drinking behavior and their ability to stop has always been strongly correlated with having good reasons to stop.
However, for the smaller things that "aren't good for you" in a less immediate sense, I don't think we have as much control over our behaviors as we'd like to believe.
Another example is obesity. Many people still chalk this up to a "moral issue" where people are making "poor choices", but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why we live in an obesity epidemic. I personally don't think people in 2024 are dramatically less "moral" than they were in 1990.
My personal pandemic realization was that I'm far more of a node in a network of cells in a vast social organism that is humanity than I am an individual actor.
These flips seem to happen on a cycle of 20 or 30 years. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is roughly the generational cycle. My theory is that each new generation of researchers establishes itself by overturning the findings of the previous generation—especially the shakiest ones.
No, I disagree that these flips are just moody periodic “flips of a coin”. The target article explains very clearly WHY the flip. Here are the three main reasons:
1. An ascertainment bias that is built in to studies that recruit and compare “non-drinkers” to light drinkers. Non-drinkers may not be as inherently healthy as light drinkers. They may have had adverse effects earlier in their lives due to alcohol.
2. Since the 1970s most of NIH research has focused on alcoholism and alcohol abuse—-not on the epidemiologucal impact of drinking alcohol. These are entire distinct topics. Alcoholism is treated as a “disease” in the same way as other addictions. But a significant majority of drinkers are not alcoholics, and what is the impact on mortality of alcohol use on all types of age related diseases.
3. There was a long-term phantasy that resveratrol in red wine is responsible for the French paradox metabolic benefits. That gas been debunked for a decade but still lives in our brains as a zombie meme.
Reminds me of Planck's principle:
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
I think a lot of it is just garbage science by people who were paid by some industry to come up with anything that could result in a snappy headline that might boost sales of their product, combined with media being perfectly happy to misrepresent even honest research if they can get a clickbait title out of it. "Science says Bad Thing you like is actually good for you!" is about as sure to generate clicks/views/ad impressions as "Science says Healthy Thing is actually killing you!"
With near zero accountability for bad science and journalism this situation isn't likely to change any time soon.
This... our understanding of biology is way too primitive to have a meaningful mechanistic understanding of what is healthy, and what is not. Most of the nutrition advice is based on simple observational correlations that are assuming a cause and effect that just isn't there. People with high cholesterol also tend to have more cardiovascular disease, but it turns out eating cholesterol and fat doesn't actually increase risk of cardiovascular disease. People who eat a lot of fish tend to have better health outcomes, but it turns out taking fish oil does not reproduce those outcomes, and so on and so on.
Scientific nutrition is mostly just "scientism" - an irrational overconfidence bordering on a religious faith in unfounded assumptions based on observational studies, without admitting what we don't know.
I think it is reasonable to avoid trying to make decisions about diet based on this stuff, but I think ideas like the paleo diet or evolutionary nutrition make a lot of sense- eat diets similar to those that humans have eaten safely for a long time, as those are what we are likely adapted to. Interestingly though this itself is massively diverse: there are hunter gatherer societies with almost every diet composition imaginable: from artic diets that are high protein and fat but nearly zero carb, to cultures like the kitavans whose diet is very high carb and low protein. Our metabolism is very adaptable and any diet that is mostly fresh nutrient dense foods from plant and/or animal sources is probably about equally healthy.
Ironically, the stress of worrying constantly about if your food is optimally healthy, is probably more harmful to your health than anything typically considered unhealthy.
Even if you throw out the research that you mention, you'd still have to contend with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_randomization which converges with that research and shows that ApoB is an independent causal factor for CVD, like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7611924/ (random google result). And saturated fat increases ApoB. And Mendelian randomization over genes that increase the saturated fat -> cholesterol or ApoB relationship, or cholesterol and ApoB independently, result in more CVD.
The evidence and scientific consensus are still against your wishful thinking. Though these days with algorithmic doom-scroll feeds it can feel like there is no consensus.
I follow a lot of evidence based nutrition accounts on Twitter yet I still get recommended quacks like Shawn Baker and Nina Teicholz (carnivore diet charlatans) who make the same points you make to story-tell away the inconvenient truth. And I specifically avoid anti-science quackery. So I can imagine what the average person is seeing and why it seems like the science is reversing.
I don't think that the scientific consensus on nutrition as unsettled as you say. As an example, there are a lot of people making money selling various diets as well as promoting uncertainty and doubt around the issue, but there seems to be pretty definitive evidence in favor of cholesterol and fat increasing cardiovascular disease risk. People love to misrepresent studies, or cherry-pick poorly designed studies, and use them to claim that the consensus is wrong.
I'm not talking about observational studies either, but actual controlled feeding trials where they put you on a strictly controlled diet for a period of time.
Even if you look at what humans are evolved to eat -- evolution puts selective pressure on reproductive fitness. As a process, it does not put any pressure on you to live a long time, as long as you reproduce successfully (which is why insects like the mayfly can even exist). So looking at what primitive people ate does not really give us information about what is healthy if you want to live a long time (aside from avoiding things that are obviously immediately poisonous).
Even hunter gatherer tribes that eat a meat-and-dairy-heavy diet like the Maasai have been examined and have pretty significant cardiovascular disease -- but they are also so ridiculously active their blood vessels are much wider than people with a modern sedentary lifestyle, and that mostly balances out the narrowing from arterial plaque. Native people who eat a traditional diet heavy in whole grains, legumes, and tubers for calories have them beat by a mile when it comes to arterial health.
You'll probably enjoy this clip from the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, where his character is revived 200 years in the future after being cryogenically frozen in 1973. Just watch the first minute or so.
> Point being is that no only am I skeptical of the claims of what I should and should not consume
Science does not that you that. It just tells you that there is no healthy amount of alcohol to consume. Science also tells you that there is no healthy amount of tan, but you still need the sun to get vitamin D. Leaving it still up to you what to do with that information.
At some point I predict the endogenous pesticides in plants are going to be found to be very problematic. The famous Ames Test for mutagens goes off on them.
> Plants have evolved a variety of pesticides and antifeedant compounds, many of which are reactive and toxic at some level - therefore, most (as in 99.99%, according to his estimate) of the pesticides in the human diet are those found in the plants themselves. The cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, mustard and so on) are particularly rich in compounds that will light up an Ames test. A fine article of his from 1990 (Ang. Chem. Int. Ed.,29, 1197) states that ". . .it is probably true that almost every plant product in the supermarket contains natural carcinogens."
To your first paragraph partly because just about everything to do with health and nutrition communication and policy is overwhelmingly influenced by corporations and industries whose interests are not aligned with our health.
I had a similar drinking habit as you. Beer is more interesting to drink with food than water is. But it’s still a bunch of alcohol for your liver to deal with so probably not great for it. Low/no alcohol beers have gotten pretty good in recent years and I switched to those. I’ll still have alcohol in social settings, just not at home anymore (or rather much much much less)
Well said, but I think some of this boils down to people who prefer prescriptive versus descriptive health and diet info.
I’m similar in that I’ll drink more or less based on environment; a vacation on the beach, I’ll probably drink more. A vacation in the Middle East, I’ll likely drink not at all.
But I don’t really care. I’ll enjoy drinks sometimes and skip others.
Some people really just want to have best practices defined for them, like they can be happy if they check the right boxes.
>But I don’t really care. I’ll enjoy drinks sometimes and skip others.
I am trying to interpret what you said in the best possible way, but I'm not sure how. Maybe you don't have alcohol problems, but some people do (like I used to) and they absolutely should control their alcohol intake. Maybe you don't have obesity problem, but some people do, and they absolutely should count calories.
Maybe you rebuttal is "obviously if you have problem with X you should improve your X", but then your statement comes off a vacuously true.
Even worse, your sage advice may make it worse and make people think that their alcoholism/obesity is not a problem, because they just eat/drink what they enjoy, as much as they want. Believe me, as a (former?) alcoholic, "it's ok to drink as long as you are great at your job and healthy" is exactly what I wanted to hear (and believe).
Interesting, I started drinking much less with covid since stopped going to the pubs after work for non-stop celebrations of firings/hirings/bdays/babies/catchups etc...
FYI: Tomato leaves and stems contain solanine, a toxic glycoalkaloid that can cause digestive issues, headaches, and other symptoms if consumed in large quantities.
The agricultural lobby sold us things like the food pyramid which said eat more grain, for example. I think people have become more conscious of such manipulation and so things have turned around. Unfortunately, capital, as always, has figured out how to co-opt the change in attitudes as well as weird Internet fad diets (e.g., gluten free) to keep people buying from the middle of the store.
Ehh. I rarely drank before the pandemic and now I essentially never drink. I don’t miss it at all. Wasn’t out at social events so I wasn’t drinking at all. I have probably drunk five, maybe ten units a year since. I consider it obvious that it’s generally unhealthy now.
I sort of lucked into a much healthier diet during the pandemic —- I had suspected Covid just before the UK lockdown, managed to get a supermarket delivery slot, panic-bought a load of healthy food and veg and then spent the next ten days reading recipes and rediscovering cooking for myself, as I tried to make things I could taste. Also developed quite a usefully healthy dependency on apples.
Both of these stuck, and I don’t really know why; habits are confusing to me because I am so disordered otherwise.
It’s interesting how the pandemic affected people in ways they might not have expected, with or without the benefits of furlough or the new-to-many experience of WFH.
I vividly remember being in a pathology lab session in 1973 when the Prof pulled the organs out of a formalin jar of a patient who died from micronodular cirrhosis or Lanneac's disease -- he pointed out that the aorta and other major blood vessels were quite smooth and showed no or extremely minimal atherosclerotic plaques. This type of cirrhosis in generally caused by intemperate alcohol use. The Prof said in his experience in doing autopsies, and he had done thousands, persons who had been alcoholics seemed to have very smooth arteries, almost as if alcohol, somehow, protected against the development of atherosclerotic plaque and the sequelae of such deposits.
But remember, these specimens were collected from dead persons, people who had died from something, usually something caused by alcohol. So even if alcohol consumption somehow protects one against atherosclerotic plaque, there are many other manifestations of alcohol use that can kill you, and leave your friendly neighborhood pathologist musing about your wonderfully clean arteries, while your organs lie, dead and removed from your rotting corpse, on the demonstration table.
Like everything in life, moderation seems to be the key.
Especially with alcohol it can be difficult to moderate due to social pressure and such. Many friends seems to acknowledge that light drinking isn't harmful, but given they don't see that as an option.
For many that grew up in US drinking culture, the choice is surprisingly binary: binge drink or abstain completely.
> For many that grew up in US drinking culture, the choice is surprisingly binary: binge drink or abstain completely.
Half of Americans don't drink regularly, which is several times the abstaining population in the UK (for example.) Of those who do, 24% binge drink and 6.2% have more than two drinks a day. every day of the week.
I don't have data for the US, but in the UK, the alcohol industry makes most of its profits off alcoholics, with harmful/hazardous drinkers making up 25% of the drinking population, but ~66% of its profits.
~4% (the harmful drinkers) drink one third of all the alcohol sold in the UK.
Heavy drinkers tend to not move from whatever bar they start at, and this is why "happy hour" exists. It's literally bars 'bidding' over who gets the alcoholics for the night. That's why some states have banned the practice.
For me, the best part of TFA was the final paragraph that went into the actual risks to individuals rather than a public health policy perspective.
Both viewpoints are entirely valid, but being reminded that the actual risk of dying from any of the mechanisms alcohol interacts with are very low to start with, so small increases in those risks does not add up to much ... per individual.
As a society of millions, of course, the product of the shift in probability and population is quite significant.
The difference between these two perspectives is often ignored, or at best elided.
No mention at all of the strongest type of study on alcohol consumption: Mendelian randomization studies [1]. These avoid the problems of self-report, recall bias, etc., that confound most nutritional epidemiology.
Funny he calls it the French paradox. Last I heard of that concept it was about secret services giving up on setting traps to spies whose wives couldn’t give two effs about their husband being unfaithful.
“I know and I don’t give a damn”
Otherwise, and being French, we heard it all. Sometimes it’s wine, others it’s butter, cheese, etc when it’s not like “God was born in France” type of thing.
I’m Breton first, Irish second and then eventually French when they’re playing the World Cup, but seriously there are some enzymes, dietary habits and so on that do justify some of the findings.
They used to serve red wine in schools until late 70’s or 80’s can’t remember but there are definitely DNA, habits, regional effects that do come into place I believe.
It seems like it's a similar thing to sugar. The optimal amount of alcohol or sugar is not absolutely zero, a lot of foods we eat that are healthy have them, just at much lower concentrations and lower amounts.
A glass of orange juice is about the equivalent sugar of two large oranges, without any of the fiber to slow the digestion. Similarly, a beer is about the equivalent ethanol of an entire loaf of bread, without any of the fiber to slow the digestion.
The top dominant comment is the predictable "msm reported x was bad now it's good they don't know anything".
What a waste of a thread. Of course msm science reporting is trash I can get that discussion on a bad reddit thread.
Alcohol is a poison, a fairly tolerable one. It's also an addictive drug on social, biochemical, and emotional levels. And likely something that there has been coevolution with humans over the thousands of years it has been ingrained into society.
The optimal amount of alcohol is zero, because nutritionally it is completely replaceable with better options, any of the enzyme/relaxation effects are either replaced with no alcohol alternatives or far better done with exercise.
The entire thread has pro alcohol compartmentalized thinking hallmarks of addictive patterns: don't say bad things about the precious, dismiss the risks, trump up by 100x fringe studies of alleged health benefit. It's like reading /r/trees on reddit.
Now will it kill you from a single shot?no. Is alcohol one of the major millennium spanning means of getting people to procreate, a not insignificant aspect of general societal demographic health? Probably.
If you say the optimal amount of is zero, it means you pretty much can't eat any fermented food like kimchi, kombucha, etc. Obviously there's a huge difference between that and an alcoholic beverage, I would agree the optimal amount of alcoholic beverages is likely zero or very close to it.
Alcohol has no nutritional benefits. And there is a significant population of people who cannot metabolize alcohol. So there are definitely at least some for whom none is the optimal amount
I doubt you could hear the call of such an effect over the roar of other confounders:
Regular moderate wine consumption is a strong correlate of comfortable, non-suburban living, particularly in a post-MADD world. Generally speaking, drive less on a daily basis, walk more on a daily basis, have better cardiovascular health and less obesity, live longer. This is a significant EU/US delta.
In the US wine is not the cheapest way to get drunk, nor is it as socially popular in disadvantaged minority groups. The health issues associated with poverty & healthcare/nutrition access are less significant in wine drinkers, and the lifestyle of those statistically drawn to wine as a beverage of choice is correlated with lower stress levels.
These aren't new or novel observations, but when we're talking about very weak effects, even the uncertainty bounds on known confounders start to dominate.
Policy is always a hard thing to write because of its vast numbers of people trying to interpret it. Writing a policy that states "no alcohol is the best" will look like an overly draconian statement to a country that has a problem with alcohol consumption.
Alcohol is largely normalized as a party element in the US as opposed to just being an extra flavor at the dinner table. IMHO, the culture around drinking is likely what needs to change. Maybe we can shift from the "yes or no" category of the world to the "a sip might be nice to pair with X" model instead.
Or maybe people learned about the ills of Prohibition in school and have bad memories of the War on Drugs and so a policy statement like that can sound like a threat of things to come?
That's what gets me about all this alcohol discourse, we tried this already. We passed a damn constitutional amendment, then repealed it 13 years later because it was so bad. Something something learning from the past or doomed to repeat it.
I would argue that both of those examples are still , "yes or no" instead of "moderation as part of our views." You can't force a society to be moderate through policy; The problem isn't policy, it's the culture surrounding alcohol.
Think of how many instances of people getting @^*%-faced drunk with a group of friends is the basis of a large-grossing movie in the US. Now think of how many instances having a sip to drink at dinner with friends is the basis of a similarly grossing movie in the US. We glorify drinking to excess in our media/entertainment as well as so many conversations I have been privy to over the years... mostly my younger years but not exclusively.
This is a brilliant overview! i have worked in a small slice of this field for 20 years (genetics of alcoholism). This article provides a much broader context for me to think about my research, and a context and history that I find totally believable.
Readit News
And articles like this one have been appearing in some variation my entire life. My take away, long ago, is that nutrition is fundamentally complex and poorly understood topic and any extreme opinions are likely to be inverted.
On the topic of alcohol, one things that has really become clear to me, is how directly tied to my environment drinking is. I've always liked to have a beer with dinner, but whether or not that was my only drink or one of many has much less to do with my personal decisions and much more to do with my environment, and I've noticed the same goes for most people.
Many of us became pretty serious drinkers during the pandemic. As it eased up I never made the decision to drink less, I just naturally drank less.
Point being is that no only am I skeptical of the claims of what I should and should not consume, I'm skeptical of entirely how much agency I have to change what I should consume baring case where the impact is immediate.
>When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
So I think there's a relativity of wrong problem that you run into when suggesting it's all just so complex and leaving it at that.
I would nevertheless absolutely agree that nutrition science and communication around it has been disorganized, contradictory, and without much in the way of a north star or a reliable "vanguard" of communicators representing a firm consensus. I feel much better about public communication from, say, astrophysics, archeology, geology, etc. and I think there's a characteristic degree of stability of knowledge particular to each of those fields.
The problem with talking about human variability is that everyone can be equally wrong just due to the natural distribution.
What if a 30% of people have metabolisms that work better with low-fat/high-carbs, 30% high-fat/low-carbs, and 40% are kinda just in the middle and don't care as long as macros are balanced? Depending on how your sample breaks down (or which group has the most lobbying capital when the rules are made), your nutrition guidance can flip flop, especially if the effects are subtle except over the long term. Without the ability to group them a priori, the results will be all over the place and may even be unstable depending on whose thumb is on the scale.
Psychiatry faces this problem but much worse. Tons of drugs do work, we just don't know which ones will work for which people so both the treatment protocol and the clinical trials are a complete mess.
It's fascinating that, at least on some axes, we might know less about core processes in our own bodies than we probably have already ascertained about planetary motion or materials composition from millions of miles away.
yet earth is spherical, just not a perfect sphere.
Can you elaborate on what you mean that you're skeptical of how much agency you have to change what you should consume? A common definition of addiction is that it is the inability to control your consumption. However, "I never made the decision to drink less, I just naturally drank less," doesn't sound anything like addiction.
I began drinking both more frequently and in increased amounts of alcohol during the pandemic, but for me, this didn't stop or ease up until I made a conscious decision to stop. For me, it was habitual. And with habit came increased tolerance.
However, for the smaller things that "aren't good for you" in a less immediate sense, I don't think we have as much control over our behaviors as we'd like to believe.
Another example is obesity. Many people still chalk this up to a "moral issue" where people are making "poor choices", but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why we live in an obesity epidemic. I personally don't think people in 2024 are dramatically less "moral" than they were in 1990.
My personal pandemic realization was that I'm far more of a node in a network of cells in a vast social organism that is humanity than I am an individual actor.
1. An ascertainment bias that is built in to studies that recruit and compare “non-drinkers” to light drinkers. Non-drinkers may not be as inherently healthy as light drinkers. They may have had adverse effects earlier in their lives due to alcohol.
2. Since the 1970s most of NIH research has focused on alcoholism and alcohol abuse—-not on the epidemiologucal impact of drinking alcohol. These are entire distinct topics. Alcoholism is treated as a “disease” in the same way as other addictions. But a significant majority of drinkers are not alcoholics, and what is the impact on mortality of alcohol use on all types of age related diseases.
3. There was a long-term phantasy that resveratrol in red wine is responsible for the French paradox metabolic benefits. That gas been debunked for a decade but still lives in our brains as a zombie meme.
With near zero accountability for bad science and journalism this situation isn't likely to change any time soon.
Scientific nutrition is mostly just "scientism" - an irrational overconfidence bordering on a religious faith in unfounded assumptions based on observational studies, without admitting what we don't know.
I think it is reasonable to avoid trying to make decisions about diet based on this stuff, but I think ideas like the paleo diet or evolutionary nutrition make a lot of sense- eat diets similar to those that humans have eaten safely for a long time, as those are what we are likely adapted to. Interestingly though this itself is massively diverse: there are hunter gatherer societies with almost every diet composition imaginable: from artic diets that are high protein and fat but nearly zero carb, to cultures like the kitavans whose diet is very high carb and low protein. Our metabolism is very adaptable and any diet that is mostly fresh nutrient dense foods from plant and/or animal sources is probably about equally healthy.
Ironically, the stress of worrying constantly about if your food is optimally healthy, is probably more harmful to your health than anything typically considered unhealthy.
The evidence and scientific consensus are still against your wishful thinking. Though these days with algorithmic doom-scroll feeds it can feel like there is no consensus.
I follow a lot of evidence based nutrition accounts on Twitter yet I still get recommended quacks like Shawn Baker and Nina Teicholz (carnivore diet charlatans) who make the same points you make to story-tell away the inconvenient truth. And I specifically avoid anti-science quackery. So I can imagine what the average person is seeing and why it seems like the science is reversing.
I'm not talking about observational studies either, but actual controlled feeding trials where they put you on a strictly controlled diet for a period of time.
Even if you look at what humans are evolved to eat -- evolution puts selective pressure on reproductive fitness. As a process, it does not put any pressure on you to live a long time, as long as you reproduce successfully (which is why insects like the mayfly can even exist). So looking at what primitive people ate does not really give us information about what is healthy if you want to live a long time (aside from avoiding things that are obviously immediately poisonous).
Even hunter gatherer tribes that eat a meat-and-dairy-heavy diet like the Maasai have been examined and have pretty significant cardiovascular disease -- but they are also so ridiculously active their blood vessels are much wider than people with a modern sedentary lifestyle, and that mostly balances out the narrowing from arterial plaque. Native people who eat a traditional diet heavy in whole grains, legumes, and tubers for calories have them beat by a mile when it comes to arterial health.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2fYguIX17Q
Science does not that you that. It just tells you that there is no healthy amount of alcohol to consume. Science also tells you that there is no healthy amount of tan, but you still need the sun to get vitamin D. Leaving it still up to you what to do with that information.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ames-test-and-real...
> Plants have evolved a variety of pesticides and antifeedant compounds, many of which are reactive and toxic at some level - therefore, most (as in 99.99%, according to his estimate) of the pesticides in the human diet are those found in the plants themselves. The cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, mustard and so on) are particularly rich in compounds that will light up an Ames test. A fine article of his from 1990 (Ang. Chem. Int. Ed.,29, 1197) states that ". . .it is probably true that almost every plant product in the supermarket contains natural carcinogens."
I’m similar in that I’ll drink more or less based on environment; a vacation on the beach, I’ll probably drink more. A vacation in the Middle East, I’ll likely drink not at all.
But I don’t really care. I’ll enjoy drinks sometimes and skip others.
Some people really just want to have best practices defined for them, like they can be happy if they check the right boxes.
I am trying to interpret what you said in the best possible way, but I'm not sure how. Maybe you don't have alcohol problems, but some people do (like I used to) and they absolutely should control their alcohol intake. Maybe you don't have obesity problem, but some people do, and they absolutely should count calories.
Maybe you rebuttal is "obviously if you have problem with X you should improve your X", but then your statement comes off a vacuously true.
Even worse, your sage advice may make it worse and make people think that their alcoholism/obesity is not a problem, because they just eat/drink what they enjoy, as much as they want. Believe me, as a (former?) alcoholic, "it's ok to drink as long as you are great at your job and healthy" is exactly what I wanted to hear (and believe).
Dead Comment
I sort of lucked into a much healthier diet during the pandemic —- I had suspected Covid just before the UK lockdown, managed to get a supermarket delivery slot, panic-bought a load of healthy food and veg and then spent the next ten days reading recipes and rediscovering cooking for myself, as I tried to make things I could taste. Also developed quite a usefully healthy dependency on apples.
Both of these stuck, and I don’t really know why; habits are confusing to me because I am so disordered otherwise.
It’s interesting how the pandemic affected people in ways they might not have expected, with or without the benefits of furlough or the new-to-many experience of WFH.
But remember, these specimens were collected from dead persons, people who had died from something, usually something caused by alcohol. So even if alcohol consumption somehow protects one against atherosclerotic plaque, there are many other manifestations of alcohol use that can kill you, and leave your friendly neighborhood pathologist musing about your wonderfully clean arteries, while your organs lie, dead and removed from your rotting corpse, on the demonstration table.
This is so depressing, I'm going to have a drink,
Especially with alcohol it can be difficult to moderate due to social pressure and such. Many friends seems to acknowledge that light drinking isn't harmful, but given they don't see that as an option.
For many that grew up in US drinking culture, the choice is surprisingly binary: binge drink or abstain completely.
Half of Americans don't drink regularly, which is several times the abstaining population in the UK (for example.) Of those who do, 24% binge drink and 6.2% have more than two drinks a day. every day of the week.
That works out to 12% and 3% respectively.
https://alcohol.org/professions/
I don't have data for the US, but in the UK, the alcohol industry makes most of its profits off alcoholics, with harmful/hazardous drinkers making up 25% of the drinking population, but ~66% of its profits.
https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research-post/alcohol-sales-...
~4% (the harmful drinkers) drink one third of all the alcohol sold in the UK.
Heavy drinkers tend to not move from whatever bar they start at, and this is why "happy hour" exists. It's literally bars 'bidding' over who gets the alcoholics for the night. That's why some states have banned the practice.
Both viewpoints are entirely valid, but being reminded that the actual risk of dying from any of the mechanisms alcohol interacts with are very low to start with, so small increases in those risks does not add up to much ... per individual.
As a society of millions, of course, the product of the shift in probability and population is quite significant.
The difference between these two perspectives is often ignored, or at best elided.
[1] e.g. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Otherwise, and being French, we heard it all. Sometimes it’s wine, others it’s butter, cheese, etc when it’s not like “God was born in France” type of thing.
I’m Breton first, Irish second and then eventually French when they’re playing the World Cup, but seriously there are some enzymes, dietary habits and so on that do justify some of the findings.
They used to serve red wine in schools until late 70’s or 80’s can’t remember but there are definitely DNA, habits, regional effects that do come into place I believe.
This said, Bretagne is special regarding this :) (sorry, couldn't help)
A glass of orange juice is about the equivalent sugar of two large oranges, without any of the fiber to slow the digestion. Similarly, a beer is about the equivalent ethanol of an entire loaf of bread, without any of the fiber to slow the digestion.
What a waste of a thread. Of course msm science reporting is trash I can get that discussion on a bad reddit thread.
Alcohol is a poison, a fairly tolerable one. It's also an addictive drug on social, biochemical, and emotional levels. And likely something that there has been coevolution with humans over the thousands of years it has been ingrained into society.
The optimal amount of alcohol is zero, because nutritionally it is completely replaceable with better options, any of the enzyme/relaxation effects are either replaced with no alcohol alternatives or far better done with exercise.
The entire thread has pro alcohol compartmentalized thinking hallmarks of addictive patterns: don't say bad things about the precious, dismiss the risks, trump up by 100x fringe studies of alleged health benefit. It's like reading /r/trees on reddit.
Now will it kill you from a single shot?no. Is alcohol one of the major millennium spanning means of getting people to procreate, a not insignificant aspect of general societal demographic health? Probably.
Regular moderate wine consumption is a strong correlate of comfortable, non-suburban living, particularly in a post-MADD world. Generally speaking, drive less on a daily basis, walk more on a daily basis, have better cardiovascular health and less obesity, live longer. This is a significant EU/US delta.
In the US wine is not the cheapest way to get drunk, nor is it as socially popular in disadvantaged minority groups. The health issues associated with poverty & healthcare/nutrition access are less significant in wine drinkers, and the lifestyle of those statistically drawn to wine as a beverage of choice is correlated with lower stress levels.
These aren't new or novel observations, but when we're talking about very weak effects, even the uncertainty bounds on known confounders start to dominate.
Alcohol is largely normalized as a party element in the US as opposed to just being an extra flavor at the dinner table. IMHO, the culture around drinking is likely what needs to change. Maybe we can shift from the "yes or no" category of the world to the "a sip might be nice to pair with X" model instead.
That's what gets me about all this alcohol discourse, we tried this already. We passed a damn constitutional amendment, then repealed it 13 years later because it was so bad. Something something learning from the past or doomed to repeat it.
Think of how many instances of people getting @^*%-faced drunk with a group of friends is the basis of a large-grossing movie in the US. Now think of how many instances having a sip to drink at dinner with friends is the basis of a similarly grossing movie in the US. We glorify drinking to excess in our media/entertainment as well as so many conversations I have been privy to over the years... mostly my younger years but not exclusively.