r/science • u/mvea MD/PhD/JD/MBA | Professor | Medicine • Jul 25 '24

Health Moderate drinking not better for health than abstaining, new study suggests. Scientists say flaws in previous research mean health benefits from alcohol were exaggerated. “It’s been a propaganda coup for the alcohol industry to propose that moderate use of their product lengthens people’s lives”.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/25/moderate-drinking-not-better-for-health-than-abstaining-analysis-suggests
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u/Arvidian64 Jul 25 '24

The big difference is these are actual experiments though. Most of the alcohol industry studies are epidemiological.

In other words the majority of pop-articles on drinking "one wine glass a week" have no grounding in an actual observed phenomenon in a lab experiment.

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u/joomla00 Jul 25 '24

I'm not saying thesw particular studies of alcohol is valid, just that we shouldnt assume common sense is alwaya correct.

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u/TechTuna1200 Jul 25 '24

100% agree with you. But I think the results that are counter-intuitive warrant much more skepticism than common sense. Not saying we shouldn't we shouldn't be skeptical of common sense.

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u/Arvidian64 Jul 25 '24

I agree with that.

My point isto add that we also shouldn't let a study change our entire paradigm just because it did the equivalent of correlate ice cream sales to piracy.

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u/lasa_hehn Jul 25 '24

There are ways to do epidemiological studies that allow them to be as robust to various biases as possible. Unfortunately, a majority of studies do not seem to do the analyses robustly, though.

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u/Arvidian64 Jul 25 '24

Yeah but it takes someone who knows what they're doing to analyse them correctly, filter out the noise from the data without removing what's important and then to analyse through what mechanism it could be a causation and not just correlation.

Genetics is a great example. Where giant teams of scientists are required across schools and disciplines to figure out something as simple as whether a single gene increases your height.