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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand how people moralize behaviours rather than outcomes. Drinking every night is fine if you don't do it to excess. A beer or two, or a glass of wine with dinner, or a nightcap, doesn't hurt anyone. Drinking every night to the level where you're damaging your health is a problem.

Having a few beers a couple of times a month is great. Binge drinking a couple of times a month to the point where you harm yourself or others is a problem.

It doesn't matter how often you do it. It matters what happens when you do. The time frame is essentially unrelated.

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First of all, drinking alcohol every day is too much if you count your alcohol units.

Second, first you start with a drink every week, then every day, then every hour,... that is how you develop your addiction.

Third, what you suggest is moderation drinking. People who are addicted to alcohol argue that it does not work and complete abstinence is the way to go.

first you start with a drink every week, then every day, then every hour,...

Unless you don't. I've had a glass of wine with dinner several nights a week for the past 20 years, and I haven't progressed to drinking during the day.

People use alcohol as a form of self-medication when they have other problems. If you don't have the other problems then limited regular alcohol consumption is probably fine (I'm not a doctor so I can't say it actually is.)

I agree with you. I do not have that problem either. But it is well known that some people are more prone to addiction than others. So general arguments like "one or two beers every day" is fine, are a bit dangerous.

> Third, what you suggest is moderation drinking. People who are addicted to alcohol argue that it does not work and complete abstinence is the way to go.

And people who are not addicted to alcohol argue that this approach does work for us with no effort, and that blanket advocacy for complete abstinence is moralising based on behaviours rather than outcomes.

Some people have an innate risk of alcohol addiction and should absolutely practice complete abstinence. Some people are at a risk of alcohol addiction due to their personal circumstances and the culture they live in and, while abstinence is not the only solution, it's probably the only feasible one. Some people have a tendency overdrink on occasion due to their personalities and social lifestyles, but they do not need complete abstinence to keep this under control and can do with intentional moderation. Some people enjoy social drinking and even getting a bit tipsy sometimes, but outright drunkenness feels so terrible for us that we are at no risk of alcohol addiction and see no point in practising complete abstinence ourselves.

Everybody is different.

Two beers a day is very, very dangerous according to my girlfriend, a social worker.

All I can say is that mindset is more important than amount consumed. Just look at depressed people drinking, a single beer already makes the person more likely to become an alcoholic. yet two or thee beers every evening wouldn't suddenly create an alcoholic out of me.

My partner is a therapist and strongly advocates having a glass of wine with dinner most nights.

Two drinks each night versus one is quite a difference. It's double the amount of alcohol!

Current recommendation from the Netherlands Nutrition Centre:

> It is advisable to refrain from drinking alcohol, or to consume at most one glass a day. This advice applies equally to men and women.

> Moderate consumption of alcohol at one glass a day may reduce the chance of getting certain chronic diseases, but also raises the chances of getting breast cancer for women. Drinking more than one glass a day, is not beneficial at all, and has negative effects on health. It increases the risks of having a stroke; and getting breast, intestinal, or long cancer.

> The potential benefits of alcohol do not outweigh the negative effects on your health.¹

(Personally, I drink only in the weekends; usually one glass, occasionally two. It prevents making a habit out of it.)

1: https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/encyclopedie/alcohol.aspx

Two drinks each night versus one is quite a difference. It's double the amount of alcohol!

2 bottles of 5% abv beer has a little less alcohol than 1 normal sized glass of 13% abv red wine.

How are you calculating that? One standard 330ml bottle of beer at 5% has a little less alcohol than a standard pour (150ml) of 13% wine. As soon as you move to a pint or 500ml can of beer you go over it. This is why a glass of wine and a bottle of beer are taken as roughly equal in terms of alcohol content.

    330×5% < 150×13%

A glass of red wine is 250ml.

That would get you exactly three glasses from a bottle. That's… not a normal pour of wine in any country.

A standard size bottle of wine (750ml) serves five or six glasses, but the hospitality industry usually goes for five out of a bottle. 150ml (or 5oz) is what you can reasonably expect in restaurants and bars for the average glass of wine.

Do you honestly pour a third of a bottle at a time for wine?

250ml is a standard UK measure of wine.

175ml and 125ml are also UK standards but in a lot of places if you order wine by the glass you'll get 250ml.

In the UK that is a 'large' glass of wine. The NHS¹ calls 175ml 'standard' (slightly more than usual) and 125ml 'small'.

For the UK this is all not that relevant, because there the concept of the 'alcohol unit' is much more ingrained and used in public health campaigns, so you would work with those. E.g., with the recommended upper limit of 14 alcohol units, you could drink a standard glass of wine (175ml) six days of the week (12.6 units), or have a bottle of lager six days of the week and a pint of Guinness on Saturday (13.2 units).

1: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alc...

Unless I've made an arithmetic error, those two American-sized beers (12oz each, 700ml of beer total) contain 35g of alcohol, and the American glass of wine (6oz, or 175ml) has 22.75g. Less alcohol than the two beers, but still more than most people should have on a daily basis.

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