Comment on Rich ppl live longer
Devial@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoThe glass of wine is likely due to a selection bias in Tea Total people. Most people who are completely sober, are so either because they are recovering alcoholics, or have other health issues.
Most people who are healthy and have no prior alcoholism issues drink at least occasionaly, which introduces a selection bias favouring people with health issues as strict non drinkers, which causes not drinking at all to be correlated with worse health than drinking occasionally.
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Idk… a lot of gen Z people I know just don’t drink at all
tmyakal@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
OP is referring to the j-curve historically seen in studies about drinking. Because researchers didn’t control for people who stopped drinking after years of abuse or people who couldn’t drink because of other health issues, it looked like having 0 drinks per day led to worse health outcomes than 1-2 drinks per day. Because of that, many health organizations spent decades telling people that 1-2 drinks per day was better for you than 0 drinks per day.
Someone finally controlled for those variables a few years ago, and the j-curve vanished. Most health organizations now say they’re is no amount of alcohol that is safe to consume.
So it’s got nothing to do with Gen Z drinking habit specifically, and the science has been corrected since. But a lot of people still internalized and parrot the “1-2 drinks is healthy” thing.
jdr@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
No amount of alcohol is safe? Is that like saying no amount of driving is safe?
Dave@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
Sure. Any driving you do increases your risk of death. But it’s likely you need to drive for other reasons that reduce your risk of death (like buying food).
Drinking is different because no one needs to drink.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Yep.
Viceversa@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
alcohol is driving?
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
i get what you’re saying, but what i’m wondering is, while alcohol is bad for your liver and damages your health in that way, it also leads to social occasions and less loneliness, i guess. so you might have psychological improvements; and was that also tested for?
tmyakal@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Alcohol on its own does not cause social occasions or reduce loneliness. Plenty of people drink alone, and plenty of people gather socially without drinking.
That said, while the advice from a health standpoint is that no amount of alcohol is completely safe to drink, humans do risky shit all the time for fun or convenience. More people get hurt in car accidents than develop alcohol-related diseases, but no one is stopping driving. The difference in outcomes between people who have zero drinks per day versus 1-2 drinks per day is much less than the difference between 1-2 and 5+ drinks. So occasional/light drinking is still relatively low-risk. It’s just not actively good for you as previously thought.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yeah but these (usually flawed) studies that have wormed their way into the public consciousness were done long before gen z was drinking age. From up-to-date information it’s pretty clear that any amount of any kind of alcohol is quite bad for you. Obviously increasing with quantity.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
because they can’t afford it.
novibe@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
That might have something to do with it. But gen-z seems to have more a purity culture than millennials and gen-x had.
Many are very into exercise and fitness from a very young age. Control their diets. Sleep super early, get up early.
They are going less to clubs (and shitty dive bars). Doing less drugs. Having less sex.
You can say its all because of money. But broke teenagers and young adults of previous generations had their fun, went out, destroyed their bodies. You know, it can be REALLY cheap to get fucked up and well, get fucked or fuck.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago