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Alcohol is a Systemic Poison + Reader Comments
Related: alcohol, backwards science, confirmation bias, health, reader comment, The Epoch Times
re: health, nutrition
re: alcohol
re: backwards science
A re-run, just in time for New Year’s eve.
As I age I tolerate alcohol less and less... you?
Adding alcohol to the slow-poison modern food supply is just one more toxin for an overloaded body to deal with. In conjunction with sugar and processed food, I’d bet it’s much worse.
I like wine, but it’s usually 2-3 servings over a few hours up to 1/2 of a 750ml bottle and rarely a full bottle over 5-6 hours (just being honest!). In part because the nuances are gone a day later and it just “loses it” on flavor and finish. But I’ve cut it way, WAY back in 2023, expense being another good reason. I doubt I’ll even have alcohol for New Year’s. OTOH, in past years, I’ve had an entire bottle of champagne over some hours to refuel after a long ride and done even better the next day... apparently when highly trained the body soaks it up and turns it into glycogen. Those days are seemingly gone though.
Original post below, plus a new reader comment
The science is shaky on the alleged benefits of alcohol, with or without potential benefits of trivial amounts of resveratrol and various other compounds in wine, particularly red wine.
Of course, if your water supply is contaminated, it’s better than dying of cholera or dysentery.
I’d like to think that alcohol in modest amounts is beneficial, but at this point in my life and learning, I’m going with this:
IMO, alcohol is a systemic poison, a way to turn money into pee, degrade your brain and liver, a good way to do things you’ll regret forever. And for many, a way to ruin your life and that of others.
I recommend to my daughters to avoid alcohol and never develop the habit. But I wonder if this guy imbibes regularly.
So what do I drink for alcohol? Red wine and a little white wine and (very infrequently) Tequila. I used to be able to tolerate a whole bottle of champagne (after a day of hiking) over the course of 2-3 hours and hardly notice it—seems that my body soaked it up like a sports drink. No more.
Typically I would have two restaurant servings of red wine with dinner*. Which is really one serving IMO, isn’t it great to be able to rationalize like that?
And I can quit it at will**: whenever I travel, I go weeks or longer without it and have done so many times. It’s at home with a routine that it’s much easier to make it a habit.
Update, late 2023: ultra low alcohol consumption in 2023, meaning that 3-6 weejs go by without consuming any.
* No, I don’t eat cornflakes, or substitute wine for milk with them.
** Quitting smoking is easy too, many people have done it hundreds of times.
The Epoch Times: Who’s in Charge of Your Drinking?
2022-05-13, by Jeff Perkin.
If you don't like your relationship to alcohol, here are some ways to fix it.
We know how serious alcohol abuse can become, but most casual drinkers feel that it isn’t really harming them.
The truth is that consistent use of alcohol, even at surprisingly low levels, can pave the way for serious health problems.
According to the NIAAA, a standard drink is one of the following:
- 12 ounces of regular beer (5 percent alcohol)
- 8 to 9 ounces of malt liquor (7 percent alcohol)
- 5 ounces of unfortified wine (12 percent alcohol)
[WIND: many wines these days are ~15% alcohol which is 25% more]- 1.5 ounces of 80-proof hard liquor (around 40 percent alcohol)
According to the Cleveland Clinic, about 90 percent of people who drink 1.5 to 2 ounces of alcohol per day, about two medium glasses of 12 percent wine, or less than two pints of regular strength beer, will develop fatty liver, the early stage of alcoholic liver disease.
“If you drink that much or more on most days of the week, you probably have fatty liver. Continued alcohol use leads to liver fibrosis, and finally, cirrhosis. The good news? Fatty liver is usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you completely abstain from drinking alcohol,” the Clinic writes.
...
WIND: I’m calling BS on the claims above: fatty liver already develops and/or predisposes most Americans from a shit-ton of soft drinks and processed food full of PUFAs and chemicals. But alcohol does activate the “survival switch @AMAZON” that causes all sorts of problems, including weight gain and fructose production by the body. So I’ll agree that alcohol is a really bad idea for most people.
Show me credible science that shows that fit people eating a diet free of processed foods and PUFAs, and getting 5+ hours of vigorous excercise will develop fatty liver from the claimed amounts of alcohol. I could be wrong, but when training hard I could soak up an entire bottle of champagne and ride even better the next day
See? I want to justify drinking wine because I am exercising again and last time I got down to serious race weight I had one (1) pound of visceral fat. That was younger, but even a few pounds is super lean compared to most. How am I doing on the rationalization front?
Michael S writes:
After reading your article alcohol-is-a-poison It reminded me of a video a saw recently (Chris Masterjohn PhD: Alcohol and Longevity) and thought you might be interested to see. Perhaps it will add to the conversation.
MPG: with rare exceptions, videos are heavy on persuasion. Assume that all videos are persuasion, regardless of viewpoint or topic. Lack of competing views coupled with confirmation bias and cognitive blindness and cognitive commitments along with your own selectivity bias (watching only or mostly what agrees with you) all undermine a balanced viewpoint.
The basic premise of the video is hormesis (a little stress makes you stronger), immediately explained by the analogy of exercise. Analogies are not an argument, and that analogy is particularly inappropriate (physical activity vs a toxin?), so he's lost me right there.
Worse, he’s also lost my trust by his use of persuasion (a lousy analogy but a persuasive one) in a transparent attempt to win-over listeners from the get-go eg “oh yeah, it’s like getting some exercise”. No, it’s not. He’s already lost his credibility.
Let’s ignore the junk data problem: self reporting of drinking habits, health and lifestyle, etc are all extremely poor quality data. And let’s dismiss any obvious follow the money problem, since I can find nothing in the bio of Masterjohn. However, he has a strong interest in generating clicks for his channel, just as all YouTubers do.
At around 07:40 we get to the backwards science part: “correlation doesn’t prove causation, but… consistent with all-cause mortality… correlations… etc” ===> proceed to conclusions based on a possibly (likely IMO) BACKWARDS premise. Namely, who exactly sticks to one drink per day (or 0.3)? Healthy people who run their lives well. Who doesn’t… unhealthy people with poor habits. In other words, he is possibly reversing cause and effect, and he doesn’t seem to recognize that.
At around 12:50, we get to the “optimal” 0.3 drinks per day.... based on a model. Models are persuasion aka propaganda aka bullshit. And re-read discussion above. That said, I agree that ~3 drinks per week on different days is probably not going to hurt anyone. But setting aside triggering people with drinking-problem potential, 3 drinks all at once is likely to cause some kind of harm, vs one drink 3 times a week 2 days apart. And those that limit themselves to one drink every other day are probably watching all sorts of things in their lifestyle.
I’d give this analysis an 'F' for a first-year med student. First, because it doesn’t recognize possible reversal of cause and effect. Second, because it assumes valid data—dubious at best. IMO, PhDs and “experts” are some of the dumbest people on the planet in giving advice because the scope of their thinking rests on cognitive blindness to the former and assuming the latter.
I can’t evaluate “follow the money” here, because there is no disclosure.
