Even if moderate drinking is good for people who like to do it, the good effects might not be there for people who don't like it.
A post-doc at my lab told me that the non-drinker group include sober alcoholics, something that might cause the non-drinker group to have a higher overall mortality.
A mention of a study which excluded sober alcoholics, and hypothesizes that a little alcohol is good because it makes socializing more likely.
Unadjusted associations in observational studies should not guide decisions ("hospitals have a lot of sick people, therefore I should stay away from hospitals because they will make me sick!"). Either use a randomized trial, which is the gold standard for establishing causal association, or use an observational study and adjust for confounding and other biases appropriately.
My go-to reductio is "Olympic sprinters have lots of gold medals; I should wear lots of gold medals to run faster!"
Clearly, it only fails because there's too many Olympic sports.
You have no way of telling if it's making you run faster, swim faster, shoot better, or do backflips better.
Color me unconvinced. These "benefits" may come from any number of things, and taking alcohol as a general remedy may not be an advisable course of action because the problem is likely to be specific. Consider the following (I'll be using "longevity" as shorthand for "improvement WRT total mortality"):
As has been pointed out., people who don't drink are weird for reasons other than the fact they don't drink (the most obvious one being that a large number of them are recovering alcoholics). Since an interventional study is pretty much impossible here, we'd need some natural experiment (something using drinking bans in Arab countries might work?) to have any real idea if there is causation. Until then, I suggest not-drinking is almost certainly less bad than drinking too much - and perhaps a more natural Schelling point than "I only drink 1-2 drinks per day").
I see this type of thing a lot. It's kind of only interesting to me in an academic sense, because even if that amount of alchohol promotes longevity, I am not willing to drink due to being an utter control freak (and several relatives of mine had severe substance abuse problems, so if there's any genetic component to that I want to avoid it). In any case, if it does, I wonder what the mechanism is?
You presume that I would rather live longer and drink than live for a shorter time and not drink. I deliberately take actions which do not maximize my expected lifespan, because a day of my life has finite value.
For example, drinking 2-4 drinks will impair me for a period of about 2-4 hours. That is a statistically significant portion of the day.
Correlation does not imply causation and such. For the latter to be tested for, a randomized study that makes people change their drinking habits would be required. The hard part is blinding it, of course.
Gak, I misread that title initially as Moderate alcohol consumption inversely correlated with all-cause morality
Time for a break from lesswrong.
My roommate recently sent me a review article that LW might find interesting:
Conclusions: Low levels of alcohol intake (1-2 drinks per day for women and 2-4 drinks per day for men) are inversely associated with total mortality in both men and women. Our findings, while confirming the hazards of excess drinking, indicate potential windows of alcohol intake that may confer a net beneficial effect of moderate drinking, at least in terms of survival.
Personal observation says that LWers tend not to drink very much or often. Perhaps that should change, to the degree suggested by the article?
Full article here.