If You're Going to Drink, Make It This Kind of Alcohol(nautil.us)

2 pointsby Brajeshwar2 hours ago2 comments

jjgreen10 minutes ago
A "drink" here is 14g alcohol, in the UK a "unit" is 8g, and that's a half-pint of beer or a small wine. So the paper's "drink" is a badly poured pint of beer or a large wine.
it’s possible that the meals typically consumed with wine may be healthier than the meals typically consumed with beer, cider, and liquor.
Meals with drink? Rank amateurs. A skinful and then a kebab is the way forward ...
bell-cot2 hours ago
Sounds way too short and glib to establish any useful causality.
And once a belief that drinking red wine is good for you has been around for a while, that habit will correlate with many healthy behaviors.
- ben_wan hour ago
  The article fortunately links to something less ad-filled and editorialised: https://www.acc.org/About-ACC/Press-Releases/2026/03/18/20/2...
  340,000 adults and 13 years doesn't sound "way too short and glib" to me?
  But there is an important missing word: "grape".
  Like, what if you only drink non-alcoholic grape juice? Which also has "polyphenols and antioxidants". And of course, such research has in fact been done, and says that yes, grape juice has an effect: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26633488/
  - bell-cot3 minutes ago
    Point on the issue with grape juice, or other sources of such nutrients.
    "short and glib" was a description of the Nautilus article.
    In the ACC article you linked - notice all the disclaimers in the 5th-to-last paragraph. Plus, if the "lifestyle factors" were self-reported - people who are more health-conscious often assess their own lifestyles by harsher metrics than less health-conscious people. The authors have very good reasons to recommend high-quality randomized trials.