Tag Archives: moderate

Why science recommends abstinence for a healthier life over moderate drinking

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In a dry January of 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued an alcohol statement pouring warm, stale lager, based on the idea that no matter how much alcohol you drink, it’s good for your health. There is no such thing as a safe drinkit was written.

Publication year lancet public healthThe statement states: “Alcohol is a toxic, psychoactive, and addictive substance; [was] It was classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer several decades ago.” It’s a sobering thought, and a surprise to those of us who celebrate our health with the occasional drink.

We all know that excessive drinking is associated with a variety of health problems, including damage to the liver, heart, mental health, and even increased risk of cancer. But most drinkers have also likely heard that small amounts of alcohol can have certain protective effects, such as reducing the risk of arteriosclerosis and lowering insulin resistance.

Of course, “moderate drinking” is a subjective measure. In the UK, this means between 7 and 14 units of alcohol per week (14 units is the equivalent of six pints of beer or one and a half bottles of wine). Belgian guidelines state that drinking 21 drinks a week for men and 14 drinks a week for women is “low risk”. So why did the WHO decide that consuming alcohol in any amount is bad?

Dry January was launched as a public health campaign in 2013 by Alcohol Change UK, a UK-based charity. – Photo credit: Getty

Well, the WHO statement was not issued in a vacuum. It explains that it partially arose from the debate over whether there is a “threshold” at which alcohol becomes carcinogenic. Dr. Jurgen Rehma PhD from the University of Toronto, researching the harms of alcohol and other drugs to public health.

“While being even, [the alcohol] “While the industry does not deny that alcohol is a carcinogen, there has been debate about potential thresholds,” he says.

“This led to a reassessment of the evidence and reiterated the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s statement that there is no lower limit.”

In other words, drinking just one drink a week increases your risk of cancer. This is consistent with what other researchers have found in recent years. “There’s a lot of research on breast cancer that shows that even drinking less than one drink a day can pose a risk,” Rehm says.

And it’s not just cancer. In 2021, scientists at the University of Oxford discovered that: No amount of alcohol is safe for brain functiontracks the loss of gray and white matter in the brain as alcohol intake increases.

In 2022, researchers also rejected the idea that light drinking is good for the heart. Using data from over 300,000 people in the UK Biobank, they found that: Even just a few drinks can increase your risk of high blood pressure and coronary artery disease..

They also found that while light drinkers appear to have a lower risk of heart disease than abstainers, it’s not vice that helps. Instead, the study found that light drinkers were more likely to engage in other healthy behaviors, such as exercising and quitting smoking. It was those, not the occasional shiraz, that were the beneficiary.

There is another interesting point that emerges from these and other studies. In most cases, the health risks from alcohol increase the more you drink.

“Many of the risk curves for alcohol are exponential,” Rehm says. “This means that the health benefits of reducing your daily drinks from four to two are much greater than reducing your daily drinks from two to zero.”

Nothing in life is without risk. So if you enjoy drinking occasionally, you may be able to tolerate the risk. “Personally, I don’t care about the risk of three glasses.” [a week]”Unless you’re genetically predisposed to cancer,” Rehm says.

For anyone cutting back after a very enjoyable Christmas, it’s natural to wonder whether Dry January should be a more permanent change. The evidence continues to mount and it is clear that less is more.

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About our experts

Dr. Jurgen Rehm She studies addiction at the University of Toronto, focusing on how social factors and policies influence drug use. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Jelinek Memorial Award and the European Addiction Research Award.

Source: www.sciencefocus.com

The common misconception that moderate alcohol consumption is beneficial for your health

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Drinking alcohol is bad for you, but it is often a social activity.

Violeta Stoymenova/Getty Images

Rigorous research suggests that drinking even small amounts of alcohol can shorten your lifespan, and that only people with serious health problems would benefit from moderate drinking. That's the conclusion of a review of 107 studies that looked at how drinking alcohol at specific ages affects the risk of dying from all causes.

“People need to be skeptical of the claims that the industry has been peddling for years.” Tim Stockwell “They clearly have a strong interest in promoting their products as not cancer-causing but as life-prolonging,” said researchers from the University of Victoria in Canada.

Stockwell says people should be told that while the risks of moderate drinking are small, it's not beneficial. “It may not be as dangerous as a lot of other things, but it's important that consumers are aware,” he says. “I also think it's important that manufacturers inform consumers of the risks through warning labels.”

The best way to assess the effects of alcohol would be to randomly select people who drink and who don&#39t drink as children, and then monitor their health and drinking for the rest of their lives. Because such studies are not possible, researchers instead have to ask people about their drinking habits and follow them over a much shorter period of time.

By the 2000s, a number of studies of this kind had been done, suggesting that the relationship between alcohol consumption and risk of death at a given age follows a J-shaped curve: drinking a little alcohol slightly reduces your risk of dying from any cause compared with a non-drinker, but as you drink more alcohol, your risk increases sharply.

Stockwell says he was convinced the science was well-established at the time, but he and other researchers have since Such studies have serious flaws.

The main problem is that they often don&#39t compare people who have never drunk alcohol to people who have. Many studies instead compare people who no longer drink to people who still drink. People who stop drinking, especially later in life, often have health problems, so moderate drinkers seem healthy in comparison, Stockwell says.

Although some studies claim to compare current drinkers with “never drinkers,” the definition of the latter group often actually includes occasional drinkers, Stockwell says. For example, one study defined people who had up to 11 drinks a year as lifetime abstainers.

“In our opinion, the majority of research has not addressed this potential source of bias,” Stockwell says, “To be clear, people have tried to address this, but we don&#39t think they&#39ve done so adequately.”

In fact, his team found that of 107 studies they reviewed, only six adequately addressed these sources of bias, and none of those six found any risk reduction with moderate drinking.

” [high-quality] “The research suggests a linear relationship,” Stockwell says, “the more you drink, the higher your risk of heart disease. Our study looks at total mortality, and it&#39s clear that heart disease is the main issue.”

The review says that it is very clear that lower quality studies are more likely to suggest a beneficial effect. Duane Mellor At the British Dietetic Association.

But he points out that this doesn&#39t take into account the social aspects of moderate drinking. “While it&#39s healthier to socialize without drinking alcohol, the benefits of spending time with other people are likely to outweigh the risks of consuming one or two units of alcohol,” he says. “Perhaps the challenge is to limit alcohol intake in this way.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

New study suggests Ancient Mars was cold and had moderate levels of water

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In a new study, planetary scientists have found strong similarities between the soil of Gale Crater on Mars and that of the cold, sub-Arctic climate of Newfoundland, Canada.

X-ray amorphous material comprises 15-73% by weight of the sedimentary rocks and eolian deposits in Gale Crater. This material is siliceous and high in iron and low in aluminum. The presence of volatiles is consistent with the presence of early weathering products. To better understand the impact of this material on past water conditions on Mars, Feldman and others used bulk and selective dissolution techniques, X-ray diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy to investigate the formation and lifetime of X-ray amorphous material in terrestrial iron-rich soils of different ages and environmental conditions. Image courtesy of M. Kornmesser / ESO.

Scientists often use soil to portray environmental history, as the minerals it contains can tell the story of a landscape's evolution over time.

Understanding more about how these materials formed could help answer long-standing questions about the Red Planet's historical conditions.

The soil and rocks in Gale Crater are a record of a climate that existed 3 to 4 billion years ago, when Mars was relatively water-rich, coinciding with the time when life first emerged on Earth.

“Gale Crater is an ancient lake bed and clearly water was present, but what were the environmental conditions like when the water was there?” said Dr Anthony Feldman, a soil scientist and geomorphologist at the Desert Institute.

“We'll never find a direct analogue on the Martian surface because conditions on Mars and Earth are so different, but we can look at trends under Earth conditions and apply them to problems on Mars.”

NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring Gale Crater since 2011 and has found large amounts of soil material known as X-ray amorphous material.

These components of soil lack the typical repeating atomic structure that characterizes minerals and therefore cannot be easily characterized using traditional techniques such as X-ray diffraction.

For example, when a crystalline material like diamond is hit with X-rays, the rays scatter at characteristic angles based on the mineral's internal structure.

However, X-ray amorphous materials do not produce these characteristic fingerprints.

This X-ray diffraction method was used by the Curiosity rover to demonstrate that soil and rock samples tested in Gale Crater consisted of 15-73% X-ray amorphous material.

“Think of X-ray amorphous material as being like jelly, which is a soup of different elements and chemicals that slide around one another,” Dr. Feldman said.

Curiosity also conducted chemical analysis of soil and rock samples and found that the amorphous material was rich in iron and silica and deficient in aluminum.

Beyond limited chemical information, scientists don't yet understand what this amorphous material is or what its presence means about Mars' historical environment.

Uncovering more information about how these enigmatic materials formed and persist on Earth could help answer long-standing questions about the Red Planet.

Dr. Feldman and his colleagues visited three locations in their search for similar X-ray amorphous material: the Tablelands of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland, the Klamath Mountains in Northern California, and western Nevada.

All three sites contain serpentinite soils that the researchers predicted would be chemically similar to the X-ray amorphous material in Gale Crater, meaning it would be rich in iron and silicon but poor in aluminum.

The three locations also recorded ranges of rainfall, snowfall and temperatures, which could help provide insight into the types of environmental conditions that produce amorphous material and promote its preservation.

At each site, the team examined the soil using X-ray diffraction analysis and transmission electron microscopy, allowing them to see the soil material at a more detailed level.

The subarctic climate of Newfoundland produced materials chemically similar to those found at Gale Crater, but lacked the crystalline structure, whereas soils produced in warmer climates such as California and Nevada did not produce the crystalline structure.

“This tells us that you need water there to form these materials,” Dr. Feldman said.

“But to preserve the amorphous material in the soil, the average annual temperature needs to be cold, close to freezing.”

Amorphous materials are often considered to be relatively unstable, meaning that at the atomic level, the atoms have not yet organized into a final crystalline form.

“Something is happening in the rates, or kinetics, of the reactions that slows them down so that these materials are preserved over geological timescales,” Dr Feldman said.

“What we're suggesting is that very cold conditions, close to freezing, are the specific kinetic limiting factors that allow these materials to form and be preserved.”

“This research improves our understanding of the Martian climate.”

“The results suggest that the abundance of this material in Gale Crater is consistent with subarctic conditions similar to those found in Iceland, for example.”

Team work Published in a journal Communication Earth and the Environment.

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A.D. Feldman othersIn 2024, iron-rich X-ray amorphous material will record Mars' past climate and the persistence of water. Community Global Environment 5, 364; doi: 10.1038/s43247-024-01495-4

This article is based on a press release from the Desert Research Institute.

Source: www.sci.news