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Gastogh comments on Moderate alcohol consumption inversely correlated with all-cause mortality - Less Wrong
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Color me unconvinced. These "benefits" may come from any number of things, and taking alcohol as a general remedy may not be an advisable course of action because the problem is likely to be specific. Consider the following (I'll be using "longevity" as shorthand for "improvement WRT total mortality"):
The last one seems least likely to me, and if you can get the social benefits through some other avenue, you may want to consider those first. I do recall reading up on some other classic studies that showed that red wine has some genuine antioxidant properties and such, but a significant impact of general longevity? I 'unno. You may still be better off using your beer bucks to buy supplements or exercise opportunities.
And that's all assuming the researchers were conscientious enough to control for the other stuff in the first place. Apologies in advance if they actually did, but I've been generally unimpressed with the rigor of studies that claim to show correlations between Purportedly-But-Not-Really-Simple Thing X and Complicated Gestalt Such As Total Mortality, and so I deliberately skimped on the conscientiousness myself. Corrections are welcome in case you guys did read the whole article. But in the meantime, try these on for size:
I was about to say, "Of course they controlled for income, that's totally basic", but I looked. Most of the studies didn't control for class or income. :( Looking elsewhere, income is positively associated with drinking, so income could well be the hidden variable increasing drinking and decreasing mortality.
Also, some of the studies controlled for body mass index, meaning that if your beer gut increases your mortality, that doesn't show up.
Well said.
It would actually be interesting to see some research on the biological side of alcohol consumption, say, some studies on the longetivity of rats consuming C2H5OH-containing drinks versus their non-alcoholic controls.
(At the very least, the rats might be saved from less pleasant experiments...)
This was already done.
Ah, thanks! The research was about alcohol and clofibrates:
That seems pretty significant! Cheers!
The only way that would contribute to the total mortality rate for drinkers being lower than for non-drinkers would be if I'm more likely to kill a pedestrian given that the pedestrian is sober than given that the pedestrian is drunk.
(OTOH, an effect such as “I'm (going to get) drunk, so I'm not driving tonight -> I'm walking back home rather than driving to there -> I'm less likely to die walking a mile than driving a mile” would be in the right direction, though --I guess-- much smaller than other effects. My money's on the biggest effect being the one about income.)
Apparently walking drunk is actually eight times more dangerous (per mile traveled) than driving drunk. So we would not expect moderate drinkers to have lower death rates due to walking home after drinking - if anything, this would increase their death rate.
I'm extremely surprised by this. I can't see how walking can be that dangerous, provided you walk on sidewalks (or in pedestrian zones) and are careful when crossing the street. What population does the “eight times” statistic apply to?
The text is here. It's based on a couple of assumptions - that drivers and pedestrians are equally likely to be drunk, and that drunken trips are representative of all pedestrian trips. I doubt there's hard data out there on whether these things are true, since nobody does random checks of pedestrians.
I don't assume these things of sober pedestrians, let alone drunk ones. I assume people with impaired reflexes and judgement are more likely to cross the street when it's not safe to do so, fall down, etc.
Alcohol is also involved in a lot of hypothermia cases. Your circulation is worse, but you feel warmer and you're more prone to falling down. I had a friend who nearly spent the night in a snowbank staggering home from a college party - if she'd been a bit drunker and passed out, she would have frozen.
Yeah, I'd bet that
underestimates the fraction of miles walked drunk by several times; if it's underestimated by a factor of 8, then driving drunk is as dangerous as walking drunk. (But I might be overestimating it, due significant differences between my country and the US, e.g. here in Italy, whereas you don't get arrested if you're caught driving moderately drunk for the first time,¹ I'm pretty sure the probability of getting caught is much larger than 1 in 27,000 miles, given that I know at least four people to whom that happened. Therefore I guess people are much more reluctant to drive when drunk where I am than over there. Also, Italian towns are less car-friendly than I guess US towns are.)
Yeah, I guess the equation was misapplied there. The point was that the statistics won't (or might not) chalk the death up to alcohol like they should, which I'd say is a harmfully misleading omission; even if it's not a longevity problem for the drunk driver, it is for the other person.
I don't think it would be right or proper to control for killing other people due to alcohol use even if you could. The social externalities of alcohol use are a separate question from the private benefits.
I agree that there's some merit to treating alcohol's effects on you and others separately, but if we do that, shouldn't we then also work to exclude some of its benefits as "social externalities"? Like the whole "alcohol -> socializing -> mental well-being"-pattern?
You should exclude the mental well-being of the others you socialize with while drunk, yes. But that's not going to show up on your personal longevity.