For years we've known that people who drink no alcohol at all have worse outcomes than people who drink some alcohol. We also thought that drinking a very small amount of alcohol - a glass or two of wine per week - was protective but we didn't think more alcohol than that was protective.
Recently a study was released and heavily reported.
One reason we thought that tee-totalers had worse health outcomes was the number of people with alcoholism in that group or people with other severe health problems. This new study claimed to have corrected for that and only included healthy people in the teetotal group. The study then said that drinking no alcohol was associated with dying sooner than drinkin alcohol. The curve they released showed most benefit to people drinking one drink a day, but showed benefits over not drinking at upto about 5 drinks a day.
That was different to what we thought before.
It turns out this new study has a bunch of flaws. There are some interesting effects. Older women who drink do see some protective benefits. But the health benefits of moderate drinking for most people are not at all clear.
It's pretty important to publicise the corrections because of the heavy reporting of that flawed research, and because of the misunderstanding (that you repeat) that moderate drinking provides health benefits.
Have they ever done this study on people who have never drank alcohol and are healthy? It seems biased that the only group of 'non-drinkers' are people that are former drinkers.
I'm probably being dense, but that did not help me understand it at all.
I understand the perceived flaw in the previous studies that former heavy drinkers, now teetotalers, were included in the non-drinking bracket and therefore negatively skewing the results for non-drinkers, HOWEVER, is the article still not claiming that even having adjusted for that that the results still show benefits from small amounts of alcohol?
The study claimed to have removed people who can't drink alcohol for medical reasons and then it claimed that people who drink upto five drinks a day live longer than the corrected non-drinking group.
Recently a study was released and heavily reported.
One reason we thought that tee-totalers had worse health outcomes was the number of people with alcoholism in that group or people with other severe health problems. This new study claimed to have corrected for that and only included healthy people in the teetotal group. The study then said that drinking no alcohol was associated with dying sooner than drinkin alcohol. The curve they released showed most benefit to people drinking one drink a day, but showed benefits over not drinking at upto about 5 drinks a day.
That was different to what we thought before.
It turns out this new study has a bunch of flaws. There are some interesting effects. Older women who drink do see some protective benefits. But the health benefits of moderate drinking for most people are not at all clear.
It's pretty important to publicise the corrections because of the heavy reporting of that flawed research, and because of the misunderstanding (that you repeat) that moderate drinking provides health benefits.