This was effective in stopping me from drinking til age 20. Too drunk to google it right now, can someone enlighten me about this phrase?

In that vein, I propose another slogan: "Capitalism kills brain cells."

  • Pezevenk [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    There is no safe level of exercise. I know someone who slipped and twisted their ankle while lightly exercising. So it is unsafe.

    • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Exercise is not inherently bad for you body though. You can have an accident doing anything, even eating can make you choke. No amount of alcohol is safe. It's a carcinogen, it raises blood pressure, and it irritates your digestive system.

      • Pezevenk [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        it raises blood pressure

        That's not always bad. My blood pressure is a little bit too low sometimes and I have to eat something salty etc to make it go up. And there is some evidence that light alcohol use decreases risk of strokes.

        It's not really good for you either but how bad something is depends on many factors and I don't think there is a good reason to call it unsafe. When I think unsafe I think "this carries a heavy risk of giving you nasty health issues". And binge drinking is unsafe for sure. Likewise I don't think sugar is unsafe, neither is red meat unsafe "in any quantity". They simply increase risks of certain diseases, significantly after a certain point. Ripe fruit also contains some alcohol (more than people often realize), but I don't think anyone would claim they are unsafe for that reason in any quantity. I feel it kind of dilutes the meaning of "safe".

        • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Likewise I don’t think sugar is unsafe, neither is red meat unsafe “in any quantity”. They simply increase risks of certain diseases

          Sugar and red meat aren't inherently unsafe (though cooking methods can introduce carcinogens). Their danger to health comes from overconsumption causing metabolic issues. Alcohol is an acute toxin and irritant, as is, and a carcinogen. If we actually cared about public health, we'd treat booze the same way we treat tobacco. We only don't for cultural reasons.

          When I think unsafe I think “this carries a heavy risk of giving you nasty health issues”.

          Alcohol consumption meets that definition.

          Fwiw, I drink and smoke weed regularly. The amount of alcohol that The ScienceTM says is safe is far lower than what people actually consume in practice (even moderate drinkers), and any amount raises your risk of health issues of some kind. We're already seeing a rise in liver disease among women in their 30s and 40s in the US, from a combo of heavier drinking and increases in the number of people who are obese at a young age.

      • Pezevenk [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        No, I actually do know people who twisted their ankle while lightly exercising, and it would be weird if you didn't know anyone who got injured while exercising. Doing fuck all carries some kind of minute risk.

        • RedDawn [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          This argument is so dumb how am I even supposed to respond to it? Exercising for 30 minutes a day or whatever is literally good for you, it has tons of health benefits and not doing it is far more likely to cause you an early death. The opposite is true for alcohol, red meat, tobacco, and other harmful things that people put into their bodies.

          • Pezevenk [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Well my friend was really sad he twisted his ankle. NO SAFE LEVEL OF EXERCISE!!!

            I will only do exactly what clickbait health and fitness articles tell me to do next time. Until they change their minds next month. Otherwise I may do something that increases my risk of alopecea by 0.000963%.

            • RedDawn [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I promise you the science of alcohol being poisonous and carcinogenic isn't going to change next month or ever for alcohol any more than it is for tobacco. But the alcohol industry does spend a lot of time and money trying to create doubt around it.

              Otherwise I may do something that increases my risk of alopecea by 0.000963%.

              Yeah I guess that's pretty much the same as severely increasing your risk of dying of cancer

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer

              • Pezevenk [he/him]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Yeah I guess that’s pretty much the same as severely increasing your risk of dying of cancer

                Yes, it is actually comparable very frequently if you understand absolute vs relative risk.

                  • Pezevenk [he/him]
                    ·
                    4 years ago

                    Yeah it is. It's the favorite shtick of alarmist articles. "X increases you risk of Y by 600%!!!". Of course they don't bring up that in practice that means something more like a 0.001% increase in absolute risk, which doesn't sound so scary any more. It's like what that other research that was posted here said. The risk for light drinkers increased (if it was even reliable and not some random fluctuation) by 4 people in 100,000 for all alcohol related diseases/injuries. That is a 0.004% increase in absolute risk, which again is hard to determine if it was even just a chance fluctuation. This doesn't sound nearly scary enough so an article like that would probably opt to compare it against the 914 in the control group and determine that your risk increases by about 0.43%. Well, that still sounds sort of unimpressive, so often they try to find very specific things so that they can say it increases your risk of x by 300%, or that something else reduces your risk of y by 500% or whatever, and omit what that actually means in practice, or the question of whether the data is even very reliable when it comes to rare complications.

                    There is practically no way you can get a prion disease if you don't eat meat. If you do eat meat, getting a prion disease is incredibly unlikely. However, it is a non 0 chance, and that is a huge increase from the practically 0 chance that exists if you don't eat meat. You could easily come up with some kind of number like a 900,000% increase in risk or something like that. From that standpoint it appears insane that anyone would even taste meat once or twice. In reality it doesn't really mean all that much.

                    I've stopped obsessing over all that stuff because the misery this shit causes to people probably outweighs any benefit they may cause. I know many people who lived ridiculously long and healthy lives, none of them ever paid any attention to this kind of stuff. They didn't do anything particularly unhealthy either (with a couple of exceptions) but the one common element seemed to be that they didn't worry about things all the time, and this kind of stuff is kind of the opposite of doing that so I'd much rather try to do that instead of worrying about the 4% relative risk increase something I do may carry. Just don't overdo it.