W4nd3r3rDrinking 3 cups of coffee linked to preventing multiple diseases
ChozoCoffee, wine, chocolate... it feels like every day there's a new study showing how they're either great for you or how they're giving you cancer.
Much like the way we were told for ages that a glass of wine every day was good for our health. I think the latest research is showing no evidence of that, but rather that any amount of alcohol raises the risk of cancer.
People who drink wine regularly tend to have higher income, and thus better health in general. At least that’s the last generally accepting hypothesis I last saw.
A problem with the older studies that seemed to indicate that alcohol had health benefits was also that their control group, the people who didn’t drink, turned out largely not to do so because they already had severe medical problems. They weren’t allowed to drink because of them.
Compared to them it looked like the people who did drink were more healthy on average. So they concluded there must be health benefits to drinking alcohol.
This Science VS episode is about that (and has a bunch of citations in its transcript): gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/llhdgj
Alcohol: A Pour Decision?
For decades we’ve been told that having a glass or two of wine is good for you. But recently there’ve been reports that even a little bit of booze is bad for you. So what is going on? Is just a bit of alcohol dangerous? To find out we talk to epidemiologist and nutritionist Prof. Eric Rimm, psychologist Prof. Tim Stockwell, and cancer researcher Dr. Susan Gapstur.
The era of that was also the first time these studies were being done predominantly with non-smokers. It was hard to disentangle the health effects of smoking with everything else. Smoking rates drop through the 80s and 90s, and wine and coffee suddenly look pretty good compared to how bad we thought they were.