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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Studies like this and the subsequent stupid fear-mongering and risk aversion is how we get people afraid to take a vaccine that's 100x less dangerous than the disease it's preventing

- Non-drinkers: 914

- 1 drink/day: 918

Of course it depends on p-value but a "risk" like that is pretty close to be a measuring error.

I think I'll take the risk, thanks

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One of the claims the paper was investigating was that 1 drink a day was better for you than zero drinks a day, and for that they found no evidence. They're not saying that a drink a day is significantly worse than not drinking.

It looks like 0 or 1 drink a day is basically the same from a health perspective. Our bodies are designed to filter out unwanted foreign substances and will work well if we don't overload it.

It seems that 2 drinks a day is still a tiny risk factor. I say this as a <1 drink per day person. So instead of the fear-mongering headline, I could easily see something like "2 drinks a day has very little significant negative impact on general health" or "non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns".

"non-drinkers fare the same as drinkers when it comes to health concerns"

Except that is almost certainly not true and not backed up by this study. The study set out to find the number of daily drinks of alcohol that minimizes health risks, and found that that number is zero. What the paper states is that increasing your alcohol consumption will never lower your health risks.

Agreed. I think the distinction being made here is that it is whether it is an "unwanted foreign substance" at all. Some of the prevailing wisdom this article is countering portrays alcohol like vitamins (desirable and beneficial in safe amounts), rather than like high fructose corn syrup (undesirable in any amount but tolerable in small amounts).

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