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Re:Almost half of cancer deaths are caused by smoking, alcoh... by mattmaroon on Sunday September 04, 2022 @01:48PM (#32715642)
It's practically impossible to to do a controlled study on any of these, so we'll likely never know for sure. If you were tasked with creating a study to determine, for any reasonable definition of "certainty", whether small amounts of alcohol increase or decrease one's lifespan, you'd never be able to come up with anything that passed any sort of moral or practical sniff test.

So what you are left with is trying to tease causation out of relatively loose correlation, which is and always will be so problematic as to be near useless. The results will always just support the researchers' pre-conceived notions.

Smoking is only so obvious because the rates of lung cancer there are an order of magnitude more. 80-90% of lung cancer is in smokers, while only 12% of Americans smoke. No other health issue is so clear, people who are moderate drinkers only have very slightly elevated risks of almost everything, so it could be confounded.

Re:Almost half of cancer deaths are caused by smoking, alcoh... by Cthulhu_ on Monday September 05, 2022 @02:44PM (#32727725)
Drinking is the kind of thing where non-obvious long-term effects can only really be determined if any other cause of issues is ruled out. It doesn't seem to have a measurable effect on maximum lifespan (assuming it's not alcoholism), so I'd rate it rather low in the list of priorities.