Alcohol isn’t good for you
8 September 2010
This is a late response to Jonah Lehrer’s post on his blog over at Wired: Why Alcohol is Good for You. Posted here because, for some reason (possibly due to the uncharacteristic dumbness of Lehrer’s post), comments seem to be disabled on his post.
First of all, the study he refers to is scientifically indistinguishable from fiction. It has no predictive power. It cannot be repeated. It doesn’t account for even a fraction of the causes for the various distributions of life expectancy and it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the life and lifestyle of anybody born before WWII is useless for predicting the life expectancy of somebody born in an era of pervasive media and communications (changes the loneliness equation), deteriorating healthcare infrastructure, no smoking, universal contamination with a smorgasbord of trace chemicals and a host of other factors that change everything the study is supposed to … well, study. Longitudinal studies measure. They tell us what has happened, not will. The conclusions of a study of this kind are also not transferable between cultures because drinking cultures vary dramatically from country to country.
Besides, it doesn’t account for all of the heavy drinkers who croaked before they turned 55, which you could reasonably argue is a relevant data point.
That said, it’s also clear that most of the commentators on the study in question – a study where those who were heavy drinkers outlived the teetotallers – don’t come from families with heavy drinkers and alcoholics.
People who come from families with a history of alcohol abuse tend to be either non-drinkers or abusers. The non-drinkers have to live with the suffering, anxiety and stress caused by the heavy drinker. Which would mean that a possible explanation for why the non-drinkers in that study, especially when you consider the generations involved, were out-lived by the heavy drinkers, they were killed by the stress induced by the heavy drinkers.
Even if that were not the case, the damage caused by heavy drinkers to those around them is extensive, permanent and spans multiple generations. That the heavy drinkers might just live longer than their victims just adds to the injustice.
