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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Cardiologist says a glass of wine (not a bottle of wine) with dinner is a net health benefit. Disagree with OP's (false) premise that any non-zero amount of alcohol is harmful. [/quote]

I’m not one of the teetotalers in this thread, but fyi I believe it recently emerged that the the study that said a glass of wine was a net benefit didn’t compare wine drinkers to non-drinkers — it compared wine-drinkers to the general population, which included many hard liquor drinkers.

I hate to say that, and I feel like the world’s biggest buzzkill. The NYT Daily podcast did an episode on the science last summer. [/quote]

It was not just one study. And the quality of NYT reporting on science is abysmal. They *regularly* confound correlation with causation.

If there is a specific study you are reading from a refereed journal please do post a full citation so I can get a copy. (I have access to a good quality science library through work.)[/quote]

PP. Okay, I went back to the data, and I slightly misremembered the sampling problem, though not the gist. The multiple studies showing that people who consumed small amount of alcohol were healthier than non-drinkers (i.e. the "glass of wine a day is good for you" studies) have been confounded by several issues with study design -- one of which is that the "non-drinkers" category often included not merely lifetime abstainers, but also those who had previously been drinkers then quit (including people with addiction issues or health problems that prompted them to stop drinking). There also were other confounding factors, as well - for example light/moderate drinkers tend to be healthier as a population than non-drinkers.

The NY Times study I remembered seemed to be this 2023 meta-analysis of 107 studies, collectively including 4+ million people, that reassessed the data to adjust for some of these issues: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2802963

If I'm reading this right, the meta analysis found zero protective benefit to drinking at any level, a nonsignificant increase in all-cause mortality at low levels of drinking, and a significant increase at higher levels, with women showing significant effects at lower daily intake than men.

"Adjustment of cohort samples to make them more representative has been shown to eliminate apparent protective associations. Mendelian randomization studies that control for the confounding effects of sociodemographic and environmental factors find [b]no evidence of cardioprotection[/b]...
"In the fully adjusted model, [b]mortality RR estimates increased for all drinking categories[/b], becoming nonsignificant for low-volume drinkers (RR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.85-1.01; P = .07), occasional drinkers (>0 to <1.3 g of ethanol per day; RR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.86-1.06; P = .41), and drinkers who drank 25 to 44 g per day (RR, 1.05; 95% CI, 0.96-1.14; P = .28). There was a significantly increased risk among drinkers who drank 45 to 64 g per day (RR, 1.19; 95% CI, 1.07-1.32; P < .001) and 65 or more grams (RR, 1.35; 95% CI, 1.23-1.47; P < .001)." (emphasis mine)

Note: I do not work for the marijuana industry, and I love a glass of wine. So this really was a bummer for me. [/quote]

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