"One bottle of wine per week is equivalent to five cigarettes for men, or 10 for women"

KaneToad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118347336#Comment_118347336

You're stilton codding yourself with that train of thought?

cnocbui

Moderate wine consumption leads to fewer hospital admissions than among abstainers: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.14490

More contrary studies mentioned here: https://time.com/5552041/does-red-wine-help-you-live-longer/

And just beacause a study is recent doesn't mean it's in any way more relevant than older ones.

Then there is the replication crisis - in which the findings of the majority of published papers are not confirmed by later studies attempting to confirm them.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

"A survey on cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result.[65] A similar survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility showed that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments."

Epidemiology is just woeful. In 2010, a meta-analysys of papers on cholesteraol concluded that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis that high blood cholesterol causes cardio vascular disease.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118347214#Comment_118347214

I have a very nice espresso machine and a couple Kg of beans in the freezer. Both see frequent use.

growleaves

I never cut back on eggs or cheese because I didn't believe they were unhealthy even when 'scientists' said they were. They've been known to be healthy for centuries.

And if you read 18th and 19th century literature widely (fiction and non-fiction) you know that loads of people from the past despised tobacco and knew it shortened your life.

Balzac wrote that smoking tobacco was a thousand times worse as a vice than gambling (which he also strongly disapproved of).

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118346461#Comment_118346461

I was and remain a defender of unnecessarily killing old people for the want of wearing a mask, keeping your distance and later when they came on stream vaccines. At the same time I considered and still do consider the young whose lives have been fecked by this pox and in my humble a 20 year old is "worth" more than a 90 year old. Hell a 20 year old is worth more than me(not to me that's for damn sure, but in general 😁). They've got their lives ahead of them, not behind them. TBH I think a young life put on hold for 80 odd year olds is not sustainable or in the long term warranted. But it's thankfully not an either or decision anymore.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118347159#Comment_118347159

So long as he's walking and talking...

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118347649#Comment_118347649

Epidemiology is just woeful. In 2010, a meta-analysys of papers on cholesteraol concluded that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis that high blood cholesterol causes cardio vascular disease.

Aye. There's also a wider issue with medical science and research in general with a scary amount of dodgy papers out there, never mind follow up drug trials that show efficacy in some falling off over time and there's no clear reason why. SSRIs for depression and the like an obvious one. There's the novelty effect with many such drugs when they're "new" so that can appear to increase effectiveness, then there's the problem that something like 80% of such trials of all drugs are by the drug companies who produce and sell them.

A few years back an editorial in The Lancet outlined this problem across medical and wider science. And it ruffled a few feathers. Well when it sets out its stall like this:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”

Like the very title of the thread referenced in the "study" How the holy hell can any scientist with a straight face measure a bottle of plonk and equate it to five fags a week for men and ten for women? Never mind they call values like "1%", easily explained by statistical noise and/or bias. Throw in some fanceh graphs and maths for effect. They "estimate the risk"? Yeah if by estimate they mean extracting it from their large intestine at the colon end of things. It's wildly speculatiive or a damned nonsense. Makes for a good headline though and gets attention.

rossie1977

Wine is just fancy vinegar anyway.

maestroamado

"One bottle of wine per week is equivalent to five cigarettes for men, or 10 for women"

So basically any man who smokes 20 day/ 140 week.... if they give up the fags they can drink a load of wine without effecting life... the women be off the chart...

maestroamado