Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related

2285 readers

117 users here now

Health: physical and mental, individual and public.

Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.

See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.

Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.

Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.

Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.

Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

WhoRoger@lemmy.world

RoyalEngineering@lemmy.world

Awa@lemmy.world

149

Moderate drinking not better for health than abstaining, analysis suggests (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/health@lemmy.world

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For the regular boozer it is a source of great comfort: the fat pile of studies that say a daily tipple is better for a longer life than avoiding alcohol completely.

But a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober.

Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health.

The finding means that amid the abstainers and occasional drinkers are a significant number of sick people, bringing the group’s average health down, and making light to moderate drinkers look better off in comparison.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] circuscritic@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I realize that alcohol consumption is constantly being studied, and often those are funded by industry lobbies, so it's possible this information is 267 peer reviewed articles out of date, but....

I thought that light drinkers lived longer, on average, then non drinkers because on average they are more social, and that increased social interaction was the biggest contributing factor to their increased life expectancy.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

Light drinkers live longer because there are very large numbers indeed of people who don't drink at all because they're too ill to drink - they're on medication, they have serious illnesses or their drinking was so out of control in the past that it was ruining their life and that they know that they can't trust themselves to have even one.

These people are much more likely to die young than people who don't drink much for other reasons. Once you remove the too-ill to drink at all, you find that any amount of alcohol slightly worsens your health outcomes.

[–] Bananable@feddit.nl 6 points 3 months ago

The issue is mostly due to the fact that those who don't drink because of existing damage to liver etc from alcohol or those who cannot drink for other medical reasons are included in the data. If you control for existing health issues then the results show that drinking more alcohol decreases life expectancy.