Thinking Citizen Blog:— The Myth Of Moderate Drinking Being Good For Your Health — New York Times
Thinking Citizen Blog: Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day
Today’s Topic: The Myth of Moderate Drinking Being Good For Your Health — New York Times
Is just a little drinking a good thing? Does it make you a little healthier and happier? In the 1990s, this idea was all over the media. A little red wine (one drink for women, two for men) was claimed to be good for your cardiovascular health and prolonged life. But more recently the news has not been so up-beat. Today, excerpts from an article in the New York Times.
Has the new data changed your drinking habits? Is it time to raise the federal alcohol tax?
How many alcohol-related deaths are too many? Who should decide? How?
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
“LAST YEAR, A MAJOR META-ANALYSIS THAT RE-EXAMINED 107 STUDIES OVER 40 YEARS CAME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT NO AMOUNT OF ALCOHOL IMPROVES HEALTH”
1. “In 2022., a well-designed study found that consuming even a small amount brought some risk to heart health.”
2. That same year, Nature published research stating that consuming as little as one or two drinks a day (even less for women) was associated with shrinkage in the brain — a phenomenon normally associated with aging.”
3. “Some governments are responding to the new research by overhauling their messaging. Last year, Ireland became the first country to pass legislation requiring a cancer warning on all alcohol products sold there, similar to those on cigarettes: “There is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers,” the language will read.”
WHAT ABOUT THE RISK TO OTHERS?
1. “A Woman who has two strong cocktails with friends or a man who has three beers on a night out may be more likely than someone sober to do harm to those around them — more likely to make an ill-advised left turn as another car is speeding their way; or fail to notice, once home, that the baby has something in her mouth; or to have unsafe sex.”
2. “That’s why thinking about alcohol in terms of your own individual risk is a limited exercise, says Jim McCambridge, chair in addictive behaviors and public health at the University of York in England.
He encourages the public to think instead about the numner of lives lost globally to alcohol, which research puts at about three million a year. (For perspective, that’s four times more than the number of women who die of breast cancer every year.)
3. “Individual risk associated with moderate consumption may be small, but across the population, the damage of alcohol is vast because the number who consume it is so high. Even as drinking has declined among young people in the United States and Britain, among those middle-aged and older, and among women, consumption is up.”
“THE LAST TIME A FEDERAL TAX INCREASE WAS PUT ON ALCOHOL WAS 1991, AND TAXES ON SOME SPIRTS WERE ACTUALLY CUT IN LATE 2020" — is it time for a tax hike?
1. “Any sentence about drug policy that doesn’t end with “raise alcohol taxes” is an incoherent sentence.” (Mark Klein, drug-policy researcher)
2. “If you tripled the alcohol tax, you would have 6 per cent fewer homicides without putting a single person in prison.”
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IP5ATbqCWPv0WKC4dCDgAiidbFVOaqR_?usp=share_link
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history….
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed.
Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.
