If you get a watch that measures heart rate variability (HRV), you will notice that alcohol is significantly reducing it, which is associated with a lot of things you don’t wish to yourself. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of alcohol.
So how sober has a simple answer if you care about your health : fully sober.
The way I see it / choose to live my life, not that it’s the “right” way: I enjoy certain things, like wine, in moderation that may have some detrimental health effects. However, a glass of wine and a nice sunset is something that brings me a lot of joy. I’d argue that a certain degree of “ah, fuck it” is psychologically healthy which can improve overall health.
I also have a bourbon and cigar on Sunday nights, usually paired some Jazz or an old movie. Sometimes I put butter on my bread even though it’s “bad” for my arteries. Let the chips fall where they may.
I agree with you completely. I think what the US is seeing now is a rejection of the binge drinking culture (which is a good thing), but going to the other extreme.
I also see a lot of over indexing on minutia. For example, worrying about drinking a couple glasses of wine, but then never exercising and sitting at a desk for 18 hours/day.
There's also the mental health aspect that you spoke about.
I don't think alcohol-lowered HRV is particularly meaningful for health outcomes. HRV is lower when you're sick; the causality probably goes the other way.
You are absolutely right. But those of us who live in 3rd world dictatorships are here for the fun time, not the long time. The more we live the more we experience corruption, inflation, infrastructure failure, war, water shortages, etc... Hard to do anything productive sober.
But is that even true? If you get enjoyment out of a drink in moderation, that affects your mental health which in turn affects your physiological health no? So maybe it's not healthy for all individuals to abstain completely. I don't drink except on holidays/events with friends or family where I can get the effects in 1 or 2 beers haha
I've had several relatives live to quite advanced age drinking more than a person should so I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands teetotalism. Great if it works for you or you personally need to do it, not everybody does.
I have a watch that measures HRV and have seen nothing that seems a signal linked to behavior.
Here's what I don't see: survivors that have a particular interest in "healthy" lifestyle.
Like the survivors weren't the kinds of people who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, were drunk most nights in their 40s, nor weighed 350 pounds for a majority of their lives... so they weren't doing the obviously very unhealthy things.
But at the same time they weren't health fad people.
Yep. I once met a guy that was somehow just as proud of his two pack per day cigarette habit as he was his decades of sobriety because “at least it’s not heroin”. Dude had severe COPD and died from something lung-related a year later in his mid-50s.
People that declare themselves immune to death because they avoid [x substance] can have some insane ideas about diet, exercise, sleep, stress and [y substance]. Believing that the world is simple and controllable is a dangerous intoxicant.
They still have a point. Alcohol use is intertwined with human history for thousands of years at least. People have been drinking for a while, and we generally seem to handle it just fine.
What other things with a 90% success rate do you avoid?
It is perfectly valid to say “I’ve seen bad stuff with alcohol and chosen to not partake”, and it is also kind of deeply weird to say “I don’t engage in anything with a <90% success rate” and then not give any other examples.
Yes, a fallacy is a reason to dismiss an argument, not necessarily the conclusion; it is a very good reason to doubt a conclusion though.
My parent's formulation can be used with other drugs in cases that are still reasonable. For example:
1. Many smokers I know have lived to old age.
2. Therefore "I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands" not smoking cigarettes.
It also makes an implicit assumption that living for a long time is both necessary and sufficient to describe a healthy person.
Alcohol abuse is can have a negative impact quality of life as well as the length of the life (this comes from mental and physical health effects). So you could live a very long life with alcohol induced depression/anxiety/diabetes etc.
The last part definitely applies as well to your own statement that we generally seem to handle it just fine. It's interesting to see what happens to communities who don't have thousands of years of history with alcohol when it's introduced. For example the Native American population, or the coloured population of south africa.
Europeans and other groups who have had much longer exposure to alcohol do seem to handle it better, but possibly just because the people who couldn't handle it were selected out of our respective gene pools. But, even then, not really. There's a very good documentary about drinking in the UK called Drinkers Like Me, that really shows the hidden cost of alcohol on the health of people in the UK [0].
There are many other things we've done okay with for long periods of time, like lead plumbing (which we used for about 2 thousand years!), which definitely had long term negative effects on us.
There are associations, but correlation is not causation.
I recall reading an NYT article about the relative health risk of various drinking levels. It seems that light drinking does not have much of an effect on longevity:
> For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average [1]
Could it reduce quality of living without reducing lifespan? I suppose. But I had been led to believe, by many news articles, that drinking even one drink a week was going to do me lots of harm.
My takeaway from this is that news outlets like to get clicks by telling people surprising and terrible things.
So how sober has a simple answer if you care about your health : fully sober.