I was surprised to see this in the NYT: "17 Ways to Cut Your Risk of Stroke, Dementia and Depression All at Once/A new study identified overlapping factors that affect your odds of developing these brain diseases late in life":
The factors that protect against brain disease
The study, which looked at data from 59 meta-analyses, identified six factors that lower your risk of brain diseases:
Low to moderate alcohol intake (Consuming one to three drinks a day had a smaller benefit than consuming less than one drink a day.)...
So the best thing for your brain is consuming a low amount of alcohol. Second best is a moderate amount of alcohol (1 to 3 drinks a day). And third best might be no alcohol or a high amount of alcohol. We're not told.
I thought the idea that alcohol is good for your brain had been debunked, but here we have a study that "looked at data from 59 meta-analyses." Isn't that the kind of study that in the past has purported to show that alcohol is good for you and that had been debunked?
The article begins: "New research has identified 17 overlapping factors that affect your risk of stroke, dementia and late-life depression, suggesting that a number of lifestyle changes could simultaneously lower the risk of all three." I'm extremely skeptical about a study like that. 17 overlapping factors?
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After publishing this post, I asked Grok these questions: 1. What percentage of revenue does the NYT get from ads for alcoholic beverages? and 2. Support for alcohol consumption also benefits the restaurant business and the travel industry, right?
Because every study seems to have different and often contradictory conclusions from the other studies of this type, I'm starting to think that alcohol effects are highly dependent on one's own physical body, how the body reacts to the alcohol.
Having Grok means never having to rely on a study of data from 59 meta-analyses.
And no doubt there's a difference between consumption of Red Wine vs. Spirits.
It's a sales pitch. The study costs $64 to download.
Makes you wonder how much The NY Times is profiting by this "coverage."
Controlled blinded human clinical trials are the only reliable source of information on this topic. Such a study would be extremely expensive and nearly impossible to do, and has never been done. Everything else is blathering about nothing and less than meaningless. Drink if you like or don’t drink if you like, but don’t drink if your goal is some health based outcome.
NYC folks and the DNC wine-moms don't want to hear drinking is unhealthy. So there.
I subconsciously started ignoring reported health studies the first time I hear them, and paying attention if it still holds up in a few years. I hope everyone does.
You're right to be skeptical.
The dose makes the poison.
I think the NYT article is being misread. “Consuming one to three drinks a day had a smaller benefit than consuming less than one drink a day” means that zero alcohol is better than one drink a day. To say that is hardly to promote alcohol consumption. It’s true that the article and the underlying study don’t break out absolute teetotalers. But that’s probably because there’s little way of establishing a health difference between very low alcohol consumption (say, one drink a week) and complete abstinence. Regardless, the message is clearly that you’re better off the less you drink.
I thought MJ was supposed to be the healthy mind altering drug, so now its alcohol? Anyway, the problem with the "moderate drinking is good for you", is people who can drink in moderation usually have the discipline to be moderate in everything else. So, you have a selection basis. Further, Tee-totalers include a lot of unhealthy people who cannot drink.
And I wouldn't consider 3 drinks a day "moderate". according to current guidelines anything for women over 1 drink/day is "heavy" and over 2 drinks/day is "heavy" for men.
American society/media has become so mentally ill, its the one that should be taking 2 large drinks a day. We have legalized MJ, hard liquor being advertised on TV, and haha isn't that funny attitude toward cocaine, heroin, etc. And a complete lack of concern of illegal aliens with diseases coming into the country.
And who can forget "OMG, you must wear and stay 6 feet away from each other - unless you're a Antifa looter or BLM supporters marching in a crowd" during CV-19
Meanwhile, OTOH, we have a deluge of "Do this to stay healthy" articles and TV segments. And constant concerns over the rising cost of health care.
A Society with Schizophrenia
A study, that made a study of other studies? What it suggests to me, like so many other medical or health-related studies, is that there's a wide range of effects on the human physiology, one that defies a species-wide conclusion. The conclusion is, 'it depends on who you are, what your physical condition is, and most importantly, what your genetic predispositions are'.
A heart specialist friend of mind that see many different patients of many different ages, sexes, races, etc., says it's all down to the individual - it's very difficult to apply anything more than generalities when casting such a wide net.
“Consuming one to three drinks a day had a smaller benefit than consuming less than one drink a day”
This means if you have on average 6 drinks a week or 5 drinks a weeks its better than 7. IOW, 5 drinks a week on average is better than 0.
So, its promoting alcohol use.
My analysis of the meta-analysis of meta-analyses tells me that 17 overlapping factors ensures a steady flow of grant money. In a few more decades, it may be possible to focus on two or three main factors.
Bearing in mind, I'm pretty sure that 'Less than one' is meant to mean a number greater than zero, but less than one, e.g. '4 drinks per week'. If they meant 'zero', they would have said, 'zero'.
In a universe of correlations, there is a scientific identity for that, and Automated Intelligence can extract it to appease your Anthropogenic Intelligence that can construct, mutilate it for profit and empathetic appeal.
I have a 95% chance of dying while reading a study about avoiding death.
Research.... from "experts" ... in the NYT.
giggle.
Trump doesn't drink, Kamala does. Ipso facto, not drinking is bad. Simple as that!
"I think the NYT article is being misread. “Consuming one to three drinks a day had a smaller benefit than consuming less than one drink a day” means that zero alcohol is better than one drink a day. ...."
No, because you're just quoting the parenthetical. It says that a factor that protects against brain disease is "Low to moderate alcohol intake" — notably NOT no alcohol. It then defines low and moderate in a parenthetical, so that the recommended low, which is better than moderate is some alcohol, but not as much as 7 drinks a week. And moderate is more that that but not more than three drinks a day.
It is hilarious to think that I could drink 3 drinks a day — 21 drinks a week and still fancy myself a moderate drinker and think it was GOOD for my BRAIN.
That is absurd!
This science that is done with data deserves serious critique.
Was it about alcohol, though? Red wine is supposed to have things that are good for you. That's not true of other alcoholic drinks. That's why I drink red wine. More than doctors recommend. But only on weekends after five.
Prof: "It is hilarious to think that I could drink 3 drinks a day — 21 drinks a week and still fancy myself a moderate drinker."
But wasn't that exactly what your parents did and thought, Prof? I remember all your accounts of midcentury cocktail parties. And even on non-party days, didn't they have an after-work drink, wine with dinner, and a nightcap? That's 3 units a day right there.
JSM
As with a lot of fields of inquiry, all the low-hanging fruit in medical science was picked long ago. But grad students still need their dissertations, and newly minted Ph.D.’s still need their tenure.
Much of what passes for original “research” is therefore comprised of tortured multivariate studies like this one, picking through the statistical noise to find some kind of signal, any signal will do, as well as flimsy meta-analyses looking back at large collections of the similarly flimsy work of others. If you rely on a 95% confidence interval for showing statistical significance, and you do a multivariate analysis on 20 different variables, you can on the average expect one of them to show a statistically “significant” anomaly by pure random chance. And some science these days is using a 93% or even 90% C.I. to allow conclusions to be drawn from the most trivial statistical fluctuations.
This all bears directly on the “Reproducibility Crisis”, the phenomenon in which we are seeing that a large and growing percentage of scientific studies cannot be replicated by other investigators. I believe the percentage of such “junk science” is now over 60% in psychology and the social sciences, and not far behind in the more tangible fields like pharmacology.
There is an apocryphal story in the scientific community that pokes fun at the director of the U.S. Patent Office a hundred-odd years ago, who supposedly said that the office should be closed because everything that could be invented had already been invented. But with the passage of time and the expenditure of trillions of dollars and the life’s work of millions of scientists, it does appear that we are asymptotically approaching that day. It’s a national public conversation that we badly need to have. When do the perils of irreproducible junk science exceed the benefits of the diminishing returns from good, valid hard science? I don’t know where the bright line lies but I know we are getting closer to it every year.
Moderate depends on where you are too. I used to work for a Swedish tool manufacturer and in our factory in Enkoping (just south of Upsalla where the big university is) we had a cafeteria with self-serve beer on tap. Good lager. Cups were only about 10 oz but it was quote acceptable to have one or two small beers with your lunch. Same with our English office in the Midlands.
So I can see how 2 to 3 small alcoholic beverages per day could be moderate. The beer I brew tends to be strong and I too have a nice set of 10 oz IPA goblets.
Don't people go to college to get smarter? That's where the most drinking is.
Lobotomy affirmation therapy is an old practice with progressive profits and minority empathetic appeal.
I have a resting heart rate of 48. I don't want to push it any lower.
The 17 overlapping factors don't each overlap with the other 16. It is more like a plate of nacho chips drizzled with salsa and cheeze. Any one chip might overlap with 1 to 5 other chips out of the 17 on the plate. That same chip has nothing to do with the other dozen or so chips, and picking it up won't pull the cheese off more than the nearest chips. Hope that helps, we can do Venn diagrams if this isn't clear enough.
I grew up in a heavy drinking family. After a lifetime of it myself, I stopped drinking about 5 months ago. It was easy, but I miss it.
Until quite recently when water purification science advanced, alcoholic beverages were regularly served to accompany meals. Regular moderate alcohol consumption is not unhealthy.
There was a massive 30+ year study done of British NIH doctors which showed that regular consumers of alcohol were healthier overall than teetotalers or very light drinkers. Has that been “debunked?”
This took me on a trip down nostalgia lane. Back when I was in grade school (1950s) I heard a joke. A woman from the Temperance Union* was doing a demonstration for some skid row drunks. She poured some whiskey into a glass and held up a wriggling g worm, which she dropped into the glass. The work wriggled frantically, then drifted down to be bottom of the glass, obviously dead.
“What does this teach you?”
“That if we drink whiskey we won’t get worms,” responded a man in her audience.
____________________
* The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, located — at least then — in Evanston, Illinois and dedicated to reintroducing Prohibition.
After COVID it seems pretty obvious that the only scientists worth paying attention to are physicists.
Best policy: Treat every declarative sentence published by NYT as a vicious lie intended to harm the decent and law-abiding.
correlation/causation. Science is broken…or maybe it’s just the NYT
"A new study identified overlapping factors that affect your odds of developing these brain diseases late in life."
"Experts say..."? Tell me more.
Epidemiology is by default a weak science. I do epi so I don't consider it useless, but it's very, very limited. Anything involving diet is extremely suspect.
If a study finds that drinking zero alcohol is less healthy than drinking some alcohol, make sure in controls for the fact that some people who avoid drinking do so because they're alcoholics or have other health problems. It might not have anything to do with the amount of alcohol you're currently consuming.
Physicists are also known to indulge in inferences from signals of unknown origin and fidelity. People want to believe... in something, especially when it is accompanied with "benefits"... uh, benefits.
When 5 or greater factors are present, anyone can lie with statistics. Any interpretation can be made to fit the data. Random significance will be found when there is no actual significance.
Next you'll tell me there are a bunch of giant columns and staircases under the Great Pyramid and they can be detected using space sensors.
Oops, that's actual news in the quack archeology community...
“ But wasn't that exactly what your parents did and thought, Prof? I remember all your accounts of midcentury cocktail parties. And even on non-party days, didn't they have an after-work drink, wine with dinner, and a nightcap?”
Yes, but it wasn’t considered moderate!
It was serious drinking and it impaired them. They either thought it was the good life or knew it was bad but they didn’t fancy themselves moderate!
Correction: they didn’t have wine with dinner. They had multiple large martinis in an absurdly long cocktail “hour” and eventually got around to having dinner.
It was really unhealthy and they paid the price.
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