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Comment by hx2a | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what? Alcohol is a carcinogen? I didn't know this.

Here's link to the CDC's website, referenced in that article:

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/moderate-drinking.ht...

This part from the CDC's website is also interesting:

  Although past studies have indicated that moderate alcohol consumption has protective health benefits (e.g., reducing risk of heart disease), recent studies show this may not be true.

I didn't know that either. I always thought a glass of wine was healthy.

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It wasn't the alcohol in the wine that was conveying the benefits. Iirc, people were pointing to https://www.drugs.com/resveratrol.html

People that drink one glass of wine have very low propensity to over indulge. The latter trait has all sorts of benefits including health and income. It is the adult marshmallow test.

Or, possibly, their drug is just different.

My grandfather was an alcoholic. I have zero problem controlling my alcohol consumption and the older I get, the less I drink. I am currently somewhere in the proximity of 2-3 glasses of wine a week, it was even less in the summer. And there is no urge to consume more.

But I definitely overindulge on HN or Reddit.

So basically just correlation vs causation.

You can correlate virtually anything that requires foregoing immediate gratification with health and income. People that use condoms consistently have better health and income than those that do not. The list is endless.

It isn’t correlation vs causation, it is misattribution of a hidden variable.

It is unlikely that a glass of wine is healthy. Studies that show a correlation between moderate alcohol consumption and health are likely measuring the fact that unhealthy people are often unable to drink.

This is a "wet sidewalks cause rain" or "hospital beds are dangerous" type of conclusion.

The health benefits of wine (if they exist) seem to stem from chemicals in the grape skin (e.g., resveratrol and other phenols). The alcohol is likely a net negative. Because of this a glass of white wine is unlikely to provide the same health benefits as a glass of red wine.

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