A Finnish professor, doctor and former WHO expert on the effects of alcohol on the human body, claims you can drink a bottle of wine a day without adverse effects.
This are the main studies he cites to back up his claim:
perfectdrinking.com
How much of this is true? It seems excessive.
Certainly not true for everyone, wine dries out my sinuses like crazy.
But for the average human, I could see it. That's a lot of calories though.
How can it dry out your sinuses? Is it only wine or any other type of alcohol? Genuinely curious.
Yeah and the calories are "empty" as well. It just seemed excessive in terms of cancer risk, liver cirrhosis.
That is pretty much the norm in most of Europe and many places in Asia also. I don't get why burgers are so afraid of moderate alcohol use.
It's like you think there are only two ways to handle alcohol; full blown alcoholism or complete abstaining
>moderate alcohol use
How much do you consider "moderate"? I'm assuming not a bottle of wine per day, right?
Where I live it's not unusual to go out for 3-4 pints on a school night with friends, while also having wine or an ale with dinner.
Of course I don't mean getting wasted every day is a reasonable way to consume alcohol, but especially in Western Europe physical tolerance to alcohol is much stronger (as far as I have observed) than most people in, say, USA.
Also if you consume your alcohol throughout the day, while maintaining some sort of physical excersise, you will sweat most of the alcohol out anyways. In these conditions I don't see any problem with a Spanish 35 year old healthy male working a physical job drinking nearly a bottle of wine a day and not developing any adverse effects.
I meant to specify for the last chapter that you sweat it out especially on hot days (+20c)
>Finnish professor
So he's an alcoholic.
I'm from Belgium and I can only agree with the physical tolerance part.
For example, having a beer or some wine during lunch is not considered abnormal. I've also worked at several companies where the cafeteria actually offered beer, wine, rosé,...
But I guess this would be considered abnormal in the US?
>>Finnish
So he's an alcoholic.
I don't know but that's not the point. Look at his arguments, not his personal behaviour. You might claim that it can bias his findings but the studies he cites are there to research for everyone.
>a bottle of wine a day
That's like talking about simple sugar consumption "per day" without discussing the actual rate of consumption over an interval. X grams of sugar consumed over 5 minutes spikes blood insulin levels in a way that the same x grams of sugar split over a whole day does not. I suspect there may be a similar factor it's appropriate to analyze when it comes to alcohol.
True but assuming that it's spread out, is it possible that a bottle of wine a day isn't as damaging as publich health institutions make it out to be or is dr. Poikolainen off the mark?
>assuming that it's spread out, is it possible that a bottle of wine a day isn't as damaging as publich health institutions make it out to be
A bottle of wine is like five standard drinks. It would be easy enough to space it out through the day to where you don't even get drunk, since ethanol metabolism in humans is 0th order and goes at a constant rate of about -1 drink per hour. Im not familiar with that of acetaldehyde, its immediate product, which is mildly toxic though.
What I mean is that if his arguments were correct, that might assume staggered consumption through the day and not naturally extend to, say, drinking a whole bottle in half an hour while crying at the computer, not that he's necessarily right or wrong. But I'd certainly hear him out. Public health institutions are full of puritanical nonsense when it comes to drugs of any kind, I blame public policy and bureaucratic inertia.
Alcohol, I've found, is very good at letting you know when it's hurting you.
Very interesting.
The thing I find strange is that - from what I know at least - the alcohol metabolism changes with chronic consumption from ADH & ALDH (no idea if the names are the same in english)
to MEOS which apparently produces more toxic metabolites which leads to cirrhosis etc. etc.
I mean, I don't know any papers on a difference between delta alcoholics and excess alcoholics, but to me it seems like there should be not that much of a difference in hepatotoxicit.
Though drinking your 50 g of alcohol over the course of the day sure is more beneficial in terms of anticoagulation.
Also, does it work with every type of alcoholic beverage? Most of the publications I remember were about red wine specifically
Though I have to say this is not exactly my field of knowledge
I'm by no means speaking with expertise here, but my educated guess would be that harder liqours and spirits (30% alcohol content) would be excluded.
Beer drinking would most likely be as harmless as wine if talking strict serving size, considering low alcoholic content
I see. I did used to drink a bottle of wine a day spread out over ca. 6 hours but I stopped not because I was feeling bad, on the contrary actually, but because the news reports concerning cancer, liver cirrhosis scared the crap out of me.
People have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years, it's even more surprising it's toxic to us at all. You'd think we would have evolved a better resistance to it.
They also served beer at schools until the 70s in Belgium.
Though it was something we call "table beer" which has less than 1%
True.
Ha, yeah I remember some teacher telling me that. Piedbœuf is a popular one.
Still done in Finland. Selling alcoholic beverages with under 1.2% alcoholic content is also legal here for people of all ages.
Legal age for 1.2%-20% content drinks is 18 and upwards from 20% is 20 for reference