This is a very uneducated comment, considering available research. While some doubt can be cast on the J-shaped curve, we have a lot of evidence for all-cause mortality either decreasing or at least not increasing with low levels of consumption.

Is that evidence from industry funded studies, though?

Industry funded studies told us smoking was safe for a long time. In the case of alcohol we absolutely know that high doses are very dangerous. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, after all.

Maybe there's a safe dose of alcohol. Maybe the risk of low doses is small enough to be accepted. But we've been lied to buy poison vendors enough times that I'll take any of their proclamations of safety with a mountain of salt.

A "poisson"?

I know it’s a typo, and it doesn’t invalidate anything you wrote; but it’s also the French word for "fish", which makes the whole thing quite hilarious to read.

All in all poisson sans boisson est poison.

Grape juice is extremely high in sugar. I'm skeptical that it's net healthier than wine.

I came to say the same thing. It seems to me that grape juice would simply make for a different set of problems.

Related: since cancer thrives on sugar, what impact is from the sugars in the wine and beer people drink?

Possibky zero. Your body produces plenty of sugars even if you don’t eat any, because your brain and other parts need them to function. What’s unclear to me is how much sugar cancers need to thrive and if the baseline your body naturally produces isn’t already above that line.

Your body produces a tiny amount of sugar compared to what people eat in a typical day. Trying to find numbers now.

> f you live that same life and drink a glass of grape juice instead of wine everyday, you'll live even longer

https://www.insider.com/dry-january-drinking-alcohol-could-h...

That's not true.

Just plain wrong. Sugar is also "poison", right? For every study that shows a negative effect from wine, you can find one that shows a benefit to mortality. Leave your vendetta against alcohol out of this - epidemiological studies in this area are very low quality and don't show causation in any way.

Yes, sugar is basically poison, especially the large quantities of processed sugars that we regularly comsume. Cutting out candy, soda, sugar-in-coffee, etc. can bring a lot of very noticeable benefits if you were consuming them every day.

Part of the harm caused by alcohol comes from the way that your body metabolizes it...into sugars. The whole "a glass of red wine with dinner is heart-healthy" thing has also been pretty thoroughly debunked.

It's not just the glass of red wine for resveratrol. There are epidemiological pointers to a reduction in risk of heart disease from drinking wine, and these links are generally of the same "quality" as these cancer-alcohol studies. That is to say, they're all bad quality, but if you're going to tout the "risks" you can't ignore the "benefits".

Back in 1999 when I was briefly at the University of Chicago I stayed at the International House, which is a large gothic building with a tower and probably a hundred rooms, and it included a formal library. In this library I found a thick paper-covered volume, entitled something like “Proceedings of the 51st Conference of the International Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons”. Curiously flipping through it, and towards the end of the book, amongst all these other scholarly papers on various aspects of the cardiovascular profession, there was a very unique and curious poem taking like 3-4 pages, entitled “Hiawatha’s Lipid Lowering Drug”. It was nearly impossible to read because it was 3-4 pages of dense, single spaced lines of pure chemical and chemistry lingo, “sterols and etherols, thrombotamates and buyterates...” All I can remember was just a few main impressions and one quote. My main impression was that the poem was written by one of the conference cardiovascular surgeons, after the conference nice and buzzed in his hotel room if not plain drunk. It was also obviously written by a doctor/scientist who knew all the chemistry and terms around lipids and lipid removal. It was also fairly deducable without understanding the terms involved that he was a great advocate of alcohol keeping the heart going through dissolving fat, cholesterol and lipid buildup in the arteries and blood vessels. I also remember the last line of the poem, which was quite impressive after 3-4 pages of recitation of body chemistry and chemicals. The last line was this: “So thought Hiawatha as he staggered from this Congress”.

It's not only a poison though, it also has medicinal properties.

Helps with relaxation, anxiety and even acts as a short term antidepressant.

With that in mind, there is a safe level, just as there is with paracetamol.

Of course, having better medication is, well, better. But not everyone has access to it.

That said I have been struggling with it ever since I can remember and I wish I never tried it. It's very hard to stop once I start drinking.

In fact, alcohol can extend life in low doses.

There’s a chart we were shown in Med school with DALYs of different drugs and while alcohol had a big negative side it also had a positive side which was the only one

People who drink are “likely to be crying” or “trying to commit murder or rape”?

You need to stop getting your information from high school MADD presentations.

> Now, it's a personal decision how much risk is acceptable to you, but don't lie to yourself how "one glass a day is not going to make a difference"

If one glass a day only slightly increases your risk (Say a few % points), then it will effectively make no difference.

That is your personal decision, not a fact.

I mean, you could say the same about riding a motorcycle. Riding a motorcycle only slightly increases your risk of dying in a horrible traffic accident, but for a lot of people the risk is big enough that they stop riding once they have kids.

People are aware of motorcycle risks upfront: They go fast. Wrecks are spectacular, and you don't go far to meet someone that has been affected by such an accident. You have safety gear, after all.

Alcohol isn't like that. Alcohol is more akin to something like going up stairs or showering or heck, a little similar to smoking. None of these things seem all that dangerous while you do them. But as it turns out, showers are pretty dangerous. Stairs make for horrible accidents, which is why it is so important to have the angle and height right (and even). Smoking, at first, does't seem like it'll give you cancer in 30 years, and may neve "feel" dangerous if you do it sporadically.

And the poster is correct: It doesn't matter much if you have a 3% more chance of dying of something if your chances are properly low in the first place - even after the increase, your chances are still low.

> Alcohol isn't like that. Alcohol is more akin to something like going up stairs or showering or heck, a little similar to smoking.

Most people I know have someone in their family or friends who has died because of alcohol related diseases or accidents.

Yeah, and you are usually dead to your family twenty years before alcohol finally stops your body.

But that's the point entirely. Showers and going up stairs are everyday activities: Most of us know someone that's been hurt on stairs or in the shower: Shower falls cause lots of injuries every year.

The risks become overlooked because of familiarity and it makes it easier to minimize the risks. It doesn't help that the downsides often aren't immediate: It takes some years to develop disease from it, after all. In general, it takes hours for you to wind up in the hospital or harm someone else - but most of the time, much like showering or walking up the stairs, nothing of note happens.

I don't know the actual stats, but the danger of motorcycle riding is something that you are constantly aware of when on a bike.

You're constantly scanning for that one car that won't see you and plow into the side of you, and if you're in the hills a lapse in concentration or patch of gravel can throw you off.

What I mean by that is it's much easier to identify it as a high risk activity compared to alcohol or cigarettes since the risk is an in your face might end you today, rather than an abstract idea of this will hurt you in the long run

The dose makes the poison. The same could be true for nearly any other drug.

My situation is almost certainly different from yours. I'm 64, retired, and a cancer survivor. I'm not worried in the least about having an extra drink or two. Life is to be lived and enjoyed.

If I give that up, how much extra lifespan should I expect on average? A week? A month? A year?

I'm not saying you shouldn't drink. It's your body, do whatever you want! Most enjoyable things have some level of risk.

I'm just saying that there is a risk, and people should be aware of that fact.

Someone out there is going to be unlucky and get colon cancer from their daily glass of wine. And they probably think it's just bad luck, it can't be from alcohol because they drink just one glass a day.

(Reminds me of a relative who likes talking about how his daily glass of red wine made him live to 90. I think it's the successful chemo treatment for his throat cancer that made him live to 90, but I'm not a doctor)

There are a lot of alcohol apologists in this thread. Its one of the most dangerous drugs in humanity and we have people claiming it can be beneficial under the right circumstances.

Even if that were true, it does orders of magnitude more harm than good, and should be considered a poison.

We absolutely do not want to propagate the idea that it can be heathy if consumed responsibly.

The French would disagree with you.

While the grape juice is super tasty, this absolutely not meaningful comparison. For one, it is not so healthy to drink sugary stuff all too often.

For the other it is not replacement in any meaningful sense. The equivalent amount wont stop your thirst and one cup of grapefruit juice feels like you have drunk nothing.