Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: chris on 22/06/2017 06:55:25
-
Recently I was in Perth for the Science on the Swan conference where I also delivered a public lecture on healthy living, which included a Q&A session. There were some follow-up questions, which I am answering here; this is one of them:
A follow up question from the Naked Scientist presentation:
Chris mentioned on the night that some studies have shown that people who drink a small amount of alcohol might be better off than those who drink none at all.
As a teetotaler for 99.9% of my life I found this concerning.
What is in the alcohol that is beneficial and how else can you absorb/digest/take/drink these valuable elements?
Thanks for a very interesting evening.
-
I was making reference here to the "j-shaped curve". This is the observation, borne out by large studies on hundreds of thousands of individuals, that low-level alcohol intake has a lower mortality than no alcohol intake. Specifically, if you plot a graph of mortality on the y axis against alcohol units per day on the x axis, people reporting no alcohol consumption appear to have a higher mortality than modest consumers. http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2443580
We don't know why the observed pattern exists, although there are two or three main possibilities to account for the observation.
One, and probably the one that the majority want to believe is true, is that there is something beneficial about drinking alcohol in small amounts. This could be because there are micronutrients, such as antioxidants like flavanols, in alcoholic beverages and these counteract some common diseases processes, like atherosclerosis, which furs up blood vessels and causes heart attacks and strokes.
Alternatively, it could be down to the mere fact that modest drinkers, with good self control, are more likely to indulge in an overall healthier lifestyle and subscribe to other health-beneficial practices, like exercise and a good diet. The intake of alcohol is therefore not directly linked to the cause of the lower mortality but is instead a marker of other lifestyle choices that contribute to this outcome. This is known as an epiphenomenon.
Thirdly, the data may be biased by people with diseases who have been told by doctors, or decided individually, to give up alcohol. Consequently, an ill-person, with a higher mortality rate, reports being a non-drinker when asked. Surprisingly, though, the same relationship is not seen for cigarette smoking, although the much larger health impact of smoking just one cigarette compared with no cigarette could bend the curve to hide this.
My advice: we don't know why this relationship with alcohol exists and it's almost certainly multi-factorial. What is clear is that heavy drinking is certainly bad for you and causes cancer, metabolic disease, hypertension and liver disease. Teetotalism is much less harmful for you than that, even if the j-shaped curve is genuine, so I certainly wouldn't urge you to take up drinking - if you don't want to - just for the purpose of reducing your mortality rate a bit!
-
Alcohols, in various forms, are used within medicine as an antiseptic, disinfectant, and antidote. ... Types of alcohol used include ethanol, denatured ethanol. A hospital or doctors may administer liquor to any patient for medicinal purposes. It is always advised that , after you quit drinking, leave the habit and moderate drinking of alcohol can re build the habit so try not to drink alcohol.
-
Probably a case where capitalism trumps science. Ask somebody in the life insurance / life assurance racket. Their profit depends on knowing who is expected to live longer.
-
Probably a case where capitalism trumps science. Ask somebody in the life insurance / life assurance racket. Their profit depends on knowing who is expected to live longer.
An interesting approach. But insurers are more likely to know the answers to questions that are both easily determined, and for which the answers have very significant effect sizes. Like smoker or non-smoker: binary yes/no answer, can be verified by a simple cheap test if need be, and the rate of death and disease in smokers is MUCH higher than non-smokers.