Reply to Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Alcohol consumption has been a central feature of almost every human society since the invention of agriculture. It clearly has some kind of societal benefit that outweighs its costs. [/quote]

I posted this article previously on this thread or the Dry January one - this exact issue is addressed by this article:

[url]https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/-dry-january-challenge-2023-drinking-meaning-benefits/672695/[/url]

The author talks to Edward Slingerland, who wrote a book about the value of drinking in society. Basically, he argues that historically there were guardrails around alcohol - it wasn't as strong as the distilled spirits we can now obtain, and it wasn't as easy to obtain/you did not drink in isolation. It was a social tool that regular people didn't drink all the time in the privacy of their own homes.[/quote]

I'd recommend a fantastic book, "Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization." (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55643282).

"Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication." [/quote]

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