Hacker News Reader

Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

> HN is filled with these pop-sci teetotalers who rag on alcohol but promote the uninhibited abuse of THC and other dangerous mind altering drugs. It's an absurd bizzaro world.

Exactly! People have been drinking for millenia, and while alcohol doesn't make you healthier, it's also clear that drinking "normally" doesn't cause major health issues (unlike, smoking cigarettes for example). Sure, if you drink 2 bottles of wine a day, you're going to have a problem. Not so much with 2 glasses of wine a day.

THC, microdosing and all that other stuff is relatively new and the long-term effecs are not well researched. Shorter term, it's clear that THC can cause issues like schizophrenia, especially with teenagers. I would expect much more long-term negative effects of mind altering drugs, just because they fuck with your brain.

View on HN

This call to naturalism is absurd. The fact that people are drinking alcohol for millennia is not proof of it being healthy!! That makes no sense!

While I generally agree about arbitrary cutoffs, 2 glasses of wine a day is a good indicator that you have alcohol in your system at least 1/3rd of your life! There are people who don’t get phased by this, but more likely people are just used to it and adapt (much like with coffee)

The concept of a line being arbitrary is a thing but it’s not a crazy line (especially if you’re only drinking every other day that’s 4 glasses a day).

Assuming one unit (10ml) stays in your system for one hour, a full bottle of wine per day would be 9 hours (a bit over 1/3 of the time). Two 175ml glasses of 12% wine would then be about 4 hours.

> 2 glasses of wine a day is a good indicator that you have alcohol in your system at least 1/3rd of your life!

What? The standard, conservative 'party line' quoted by national health authorities is that people process around 1 standard drink per hour. A standard glass of wine is 2 standard drinks, so 2 glasses would take 4 hours max to process, or 1/6 of a day. Unless you're using one of those giant glasses and filling it to the brim so your 'two glasses' is actually a bottle or more.

An hour? That feels pretty quick but I guess the standard is the standard.

If you read my comment carefully, I say exactly that. We know it's not healthy, but we also know that there are no crazy long-term effects if you keep it moderate.

My comment is specifically about people saying alcohol is bad but then smoking weed all day or taking LSD and other drugs and think it's good for them.

> We know it's not healthy, but we also know that there are no crazy long-term effects if you keep it moderate.

I think this claim is unjustified, and that's what your parent comment is trying to point out. Is 14 drinks a week too much? Maybe not, but you aren't likely to find documentary proof of that by looking to the "millennia" of people who did it during an era where those who survived childhood could expect to live to be 60 or so and there was little to no understanding of modern medicine.

If we were able to say with some certainty that 14 drinks a week will give you a 15% chance of getting a serious liver disease, possibly dying from it, I think most people would agree that 14 drinks a week is "dangerous". It's also dangerous at a level that would be near-impossible to discern for generations past.

I am sure plenty of people could claim that cannabis and other drugs found in nature have been used just as long if not longer than alcohol by various tribes and groups around the world.

There isn’t a safe amount of alcohol unfortunately. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/18/any-amount-o...

That statement is untested. The study you linked to tested some effect but not what the headline suggests.

These people drank 14 or less drinks a week.

They didn't test one glass or half a glass or a sip per week.

Today's study said 15 is heavy drinking. Where does 14 fit in?

Did you … did you not read the article that says alcohol causes cancer?

drinking normally increases risks of cancer much more than tobacco does.

Doing what with tobacco? Smoking it surely increases risk of cancer more, no?

Not if you look at the data. Alcohol makes a lot more damage across multiple organs and is much more of a killer than smoking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com