Alcohol moderation

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Ego
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by Ego »

Did wrote:Cancer risk only. Overall mortality seems to be clearly down.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritions ... ull-story/
Correlations vs causes. Alcohol definitely causes cancer. It is also correlated with a longer life and lower risk of dying from certain disease. Note, those same correlations exist for social connectedness. Many use alcohol as a way to connect with others and many teetotalers are loners. Both may be confounding factors in the correlations of the Harvard article.

Be social without alcohol and you get the best of both worlds. Drink alone and you get the worst of both.

Did
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by Did »

Familiar with the concept but that doesn't seem to be the conclusion of many studies.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Ego said: Be social without alcohol and you get the best of both worlds.
Yay!!! And then you can eat all the cookies you want! Right?

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Ego
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by Ego »

Did wrote:Familiar with the concept but that doesn't seem to be the conclusion of many studies.
Au contraire.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/alcohol-con ... nce-379001

Studies comparing abstainers vs moderate drinkers are biased because abstainers are more likely to:
-be previous alcohol abusers
-abstain because they are in poor health and are taking medications
-be obese
-smoke cigarettes
-be significantly lower on the socioeconomic scale than moderate drinkers
-have depressive symptoms
-use avoidance coping
-have lower physical activity than moderate drinkers
-have fewer friends
-be single
After correcting the abstainer “biases” and certain design issues in the studies they reviewed, the researchers found that moderate drinkers no longer had an advantage in terms of longevity. They also noted that there were only 13 studies that avoided this kind of bias, and their results showed no health benefit to consuming alcohol moderately.
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jacob
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by jacob »

@Ego - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQqiuynMwCQ I see how you are :-D ;-P

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jennypenny
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by jennypenny »

Yeah, poor form bumping this thread on Friday night. :P

Since I'm already two glasses of sangria into happy hour, I'm not going to bother reading those charts until tomorrow.

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Ego
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by Ego »

Hah. We're having a dinner party tomorrow. Mrs. Ego just told me she'll be making Virgin Hibiscus Sangria and a tofu cheesecake. It's a wonder we have any friends.

JamesR
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by JamesR »

Aussies/English/Irish/Italian/Polish/German/Russian/Whatever

Associating particular cultures with <stereotype>
Associating YOUR background/heritage/culture with <stereotype>

This type of sloppy thinking is what I would classify has indirect racism.

It's also relatively unscientific/irrelevant, and also potentially just a crappy blanket rationalization to persist in <stereotype>.

CECTPA
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by CECTPA »

I'm Russian, moderation didn't work on me. Had to quit, no alcohol for about 15 months, quite happy about it. Saves time and money.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Tofu cheesecake is an abomination. Nut butter combined with coconut milk will create a tasty variation on the traditional dessert (Pretty rare for me to throw a holiday party without at least one vegan in attendance.) The trick to entertaining without alcohol is to include a good deal of the silly and surreal in the plans and a provocative variety of guests. For instance, you could set up a slip and slide on your lawn, provide a variety of funny bathing suits you purchased at the $1 thrift store, and then let everybody take a turn attempting to set off a mini cannon loaded with various projectiles, followed by a lively game of 19th Century Celebrities.

Noedig
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by Noedig »

Alcohol has always sent me to sleep, I can manage a weak beer, but more than that and I'm dozing unless I'm doing something physical to keep me awake.

There are also the emotional associations: my Pa drank, and it didn't improve him. Perhaps for that reason none of us three kids ever did deep benders and my brother is teetotal.

That said, cycling home after a couple of beers is great - and certainly helps cut down on the hangover next day. Sounds mad, particularly in London, but I do that every few months.

My favourite - 2.8% Morrison's Biere Continentale in those little french squat 250ml bottles. Easily strong enough for me on a sunny day.

poleo
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by poleo »

I'm Norwegian living in Norway, and our drinking culture has historically been one of getting hammered in the weekends on whatever you can get your hands on. The last 10-20 years have seen a slow adoption of more "continental" habits, i.e. like the French and Italian of having a modest drink in the weekdays - though notice that this in no way has replaced the old culture, only added to it. So there's a lot of drinking going on.

Personally I very much enjoy a drink, both the inebriating social cans of beer and the fine aspects the Scottish highlands, rolling fields of Mosel or whatever. I'm also an avid home brewer, which helps in keeping costs low, as Norway is extremely expensive for alcohol. What all this means is that I potentially could be drinking quite a lot, as I used to do.

What I've found useful in developing a healthy relationship to drinks, is simple. Have a meaningful life, filled with rewarding activities, and you quickly discover that there's little time left for drinking regularly. The times when you do graba a few drink, it becomes a bit of a special occasion, and you take the following day off in order to take it easy and perhaps recover. I do this kind of social drinking once or twice a month.

As for alcoholic drinks purely for culinary luxury, I enjoy these also quite rarely, and generally on weekends when I don't have to get up in the morning. Not that I get drunk, or even a buzz from this, but I find even the smallest amount of alcohol has a noticeable effect on my ability to feel fresh in the morning.

In other words, my solution to the original problem is to draw up a life with meaningful pursuits, as to make drinking a lower priority than everything else. I think all kinds of white days, weeks or years are stupid, since this is basically simple denial of the problem - it doesn't go away. For me, the meaningful pursuits are farming, working as a self-taught cook in a restaurant, reading, socializing and spending time outdoors. For me, I see these things and my ability to do them as a direct consequence of my implementing the ERE principles into my life.

akratic
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by akratic »

I drink in moderation, but not because I've mastered alcohol, but more because I don't like it.

I don't like how it messes up my sleep and my body and my mind. I don't like crutches, and I don't need it to relax or socialize. However, I do need it to dance. And I also need to drink occasionally to help relate to the many people who have alcohol as a dominant part of their life.

I was reluctant to try alcohol for the first time because I already considered myself to have poor control over my impulses, and I was worried that I'd become an alcoholic. But it turned out that since I don't like drinking very much it's easy to control. I would say the best advice you could get is not from someone like me, but instead someone who had a real problem that they conquered. Have you read the AA Big Book? It's a pretty interesting book even if you don't have a problem. Although they're not going for moderation as much as getting their life back, so maybe it's too heavy.

cmonkey
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by cmonkey »

I think the answer to this is to develop tastes outside of alcohol. Don't even consider it. Become addicted to water instead. Add in some apple juice.

I haven't had alcohol for over a year and that was homebrew elderflower. Last time I bought........maybe 2+ years. Not because I fear addiction but because it costs way too much and I'm too lazy to make my own.

theanimal
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by theanimal »

I can count the number of times I drink on an annual basis likely with less than one hand nowadays, occasionally two. That is still too much for my liking. Like Akratic and others, I hate the effect alcohol has on my body and mind. Just one or two drinks and I can feel slightly worse the next day. There is no sense in poisoning my body for that. I used to drink fairly regularly in high school and 2 out of my 3 years in college. But those days are long gone.

It's interesting to see how most people past college in their 20s and 30s still like to drink a lot. I find it pretty immature. I get why it's done, it's an escape and a means for bonding, but it is peculiar how so many people place alcohol on a pedestal in their lives. This and worship/devotion to the TV is beyond my realm of understanding.

OTCW
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by OTCW »

I drink 0 to 5 beers a week. Average about 2.5 if I was guessing. Usually 2 on social night with the SO's work colleagues, and the others sprinkled in randomly one at a time. I like a good beer, but my days of many beers at a sitting are long gone. My 'secret' to alcohol moderation has been maturing or growing up. Never acquired a taste for liquor or wine.

BRUTE
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by BRUTE »

alcohol tastes terrible. brute does not understand why humans ingest it. uuugh.

bryan
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by bryan »

BRUTE wrote:alcohol tastes terrible. brute does not understand why humans ingest it. uuugh.
it goes with being human, BRUTE.

BRUTE
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by BRUTE »

who's the laughing man now? :D

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Ego
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Re: Alcohol moderation

Post by Ego »

Kudos to Wired for publishing this, considering a lot of their advertising comes from the big-alcohol.

https://www.wired.com/2016/09/muddled-t ... ze-cancer/

This past March, Jennie Connor, a preventative and social medicine researcher from New Zealand’s University of Otago, published a review of studies looking at the correlation between drinking and cancer, concluding that “there is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites in the body and probably others.” Her analysis credits alcohol with nearly 6 percent of all cancer deaths worldwide.

The big change here is is the use of the word "causes".

“Lots of us drink and we’d really like to believe drinking is good for us,” says Naimi. “But the research around that has really fallen apart in the last couple years.”

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