Alcohol is probably the worst example of a health issue where all sorts of people—including numerous official “experts” with lofty titles and credentials—obsessively insist on one or another set of recommendations that are supposed to be valid for everyone, while completely ignoring the enormous relevant variation between individuals. Consequently, the claims commonly heard in public about this topic are almost pure nonsense.
In reality, depending on your genotype, a glass of wine a day can have very different effects. If you’re exceptionally alcohol-intolerant, it may cause acute poisoning, and if you’re exceptionally prone to alcoholism, it’s a good idea to stay off booze completely. On the other hand, for some people it’s perfectly safe to drink several liters of beer or wine (or a whole bottle of hard liquor) every day—they can do it for decades without ever appearing visibly drunk, and live to ripe old age until something entirely unrelated kills them. Most people are somewhere in-between, of course, but there is definitely no such thing as a universally valid limit for safe drinking. (Not to even get into the complex and non-obvious lifestyle factors that further complicate individual reactions to various levels of drinking.)
Considering all this enormous individual variation, it’s absurdly silly to give any universal recommendations about whether a certain level of drinking is on the net positive or negative. It’s as stupid as if someone tried to come up with a recommended shoe size for everyone without taking into account individual differences in foot size. (And to make things exceptionally un-PC and thus difficult to discuss meaningfully in public, alcohol tolerance appears to have been a subject of very recent evolution, and therefore correlates significantly with ethnicity. In this regard, it’s similar to lactose tolerance.)
Interesting distinction—I suppose I was expecting that if it weren’t for prejudice against alcohol, the experts would be taking those studies and saying that everyone should have one drink per day, even if what I said was more reasonable.
In a sane world, the experts would be saying something more like “Try out one drink per day if it seems to make sense for you.”
Alcohol is probably the worst example of a health issue where all sorts of people—including numerous official “experts” with lofty titles and credentials—obsessively insist on one or another set of recommendations that are supposed to be valid for everyone, while completely ignoring the enormous relevant variation between individuals. Consequently, the claims commonly heard in public about this topic are almost pure nonsense.
In reality, depending on your genotype, a glass of wine a day can have very different effects. If you’re exceptionally alcohol-intolerant, it may cause acute poisoning, and if you’re exceptionally prone to alcoholism, it’s a good idea to stay off booze completely. On the other hand, for some people it’s perfectly safe to drink several liters of beer or wine (or a whole bottle of hard liquor) every day—they can do it for decades without ever appearing visibly drunk, and live to ripe old age until something entirely unrelated kills them. Most people are somewhere in-between, of course, but there is definitely no such thing as a universally valid limit for safe drinking. (Not to even get into the complex and non-obvious lifestyle factors that further complicate individual reactions to various levels of drinking.)
Considering all this enormous individual variation, it’s absurdly silly to give any universal recommendations about whether a certain level of drinking is on the net positive or negative. It’s as stupid as if someone tried to come up with a recommended shoe size for everyone without taking into account individual differences in foot size. (And to make things exceptionally un-PC and thus difficult to discuss meaningfully in public, alcohol tolerance appears to have been a subject of very recent evolution, and therefore correlates significantly with ethnicity. In this regard, it’s similar to lactose tolerance.)
Interesting distinction—I suppose I was expecting that if it weren’t for prejudice against alcohol, the experts would be taking those studies and saying that everyone should have one drink per day, even if what I said was more reasonable.
In a sane world, the experts would be saying something more like “Try out one drink per day if it seems to make sense for you.”
Or “Whatever, one drink is going to make barely any difference spend your attention on things that may actually matter.”