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Go ahead and have a beer today

Published on 41 Comments on Go ahead and have a beer today

Matt Grawitch brings to our attention a new study on alcohol consumption:

Just Half A Beer Per Day Shrinks Your Brain, Suggests Study

Bad news for casual drinkers — just one to two alcohol units a day results in lower brain volume, only getting worse as consumption increases, a new study suggests. The study continues to challenge the belief that small amounts of alcohol are of no consequence — or are even healthy — finding that those with significant brain alterations from alcohol consumption may have cognitive impairments as a result.

Grawitch has his own beef with this study, but here's mine:

Brain volume goes slightly up if you drink very small amounts (0-1 units) and is also up among men in the in the 1-2 unit category that the authors talk about. It's only down among women, and even then by only the tiniest amount.

So go ahead and have your beer or your daily glass of white wine. It's just not worth worrying about.

41 thoughts on “Go ahead and have a beer today”

  2. jharp

    “Brain volume goes slightly up if you drink very small amounts“

    I used to play a lot of golf. And drink a lot of beer.

    All of my playing group was in agreement.

    Drinking the right amount of beer improved your game.

  3. arghasnarg

    I assume that any dietary advice I see in the popular media is one of:

    - Paid placement
    - Some stupid P-hacking study, additionally misinterpreted
    - Filler from some syndication content provider, probably written by GPT3.

    And ignore it like it was a Rand Paul speech.

    2. KenSchulz

      When I read that ‘research shows’ that caffeine or beer or wine in moderation has this or that deleterious effect, I tend to suspect that the researcher might fall within Mencken’s definition of a Puritan ….

    1. golack

      and coffee reduces risk (use a paper filter! not this study, but do it)....so what happens with Irish Coffee?

      1. cld

        As it probably contains Irish whisky and sugar I'd expect inexplicable arguing, weeping, song and belligerent diarrhea, followed by diabetes at a safe enough distance in time to create plausible deniability.

      2. Salamander

        Yeah, there's a lot to be said for "dying healthy" instead of in a hospital bed that you've occupied for months.

        1. JonF311

          The longer you live the more likely you are to suffer frailty and dementia. My step-mother had a massive and unanticipated heart attack just after her 74th birthday. Yes, it left the rest of us with emotional whiplash to lose her without warning. But it better for her to go like that than to live until 90 in frail state a nursing home as her mother had.

    1. MindGame

      Once again Germany could learn something from its neighbors to the south and especially the ones to the north.

  8. bbleh

    So ... wait a sec. Shrinking your brain is bad? I kinda thought that was part of the point! Of course, I drink, so maybe I can't understand. But in that case, WHO CARES?!? 😃

      1. JonF311

        Based in cranial sizes Neanderthals had larger brains than we did. Where's the advanced Neanderthal science and technology, the glorious art and mind-bending philosophy and religion? Heck why didn't they survive instead our human type?

  9. climatemusings

    It says it is "normalized": so it seems to me that maybe all of the bars are relative to the total population. The x axis says that the p-values are compared to the [0,1] group: so the [1,2] group is statistically significantly below the [0,1] group (whereas the [0] group and the [0,1] group are not distinguishable).

    So I don't think it is right to say that men in the [1,2] group show brain growth, because they are statistically significantly less than the lower drinking group.

    1. Perry

      Exactly. The ** shows the significance of the difference and the height of the bars shows the decrease from the non-drinking group. Brain shrinkage is not good either. The jokes about it neglect that when one is approaching the 80s, you would prefer to have better cognitive functioning because it directly relates to quality of life. And the greater decrease among women doesn't men there isn't a decrease among men too, because the comparison is to the non-drinking group, not the line drawn at 0.0 as a baseline.

      Drinking 0 beers might increase brain size if there were learning going on at the same time, brain stimulation that might result in increase in brain size, that is not being depressed by alcohol consumption. Learning means increase in connections among neurons and increased density of dendrites on neurons. That would lead to increased brain size without the consumption of alcohol to inhibit growth.

      All these jokes sound like defensiveness when it seems pretty clear that drinking alcohol is not a good idea for one's health and lifestyle. Those who say that it won't matter when they're old, because being old sucks anyway, don't realize that when they actually are old, preserving even small abilities in functioning can make a difference in quality of life. Old people are capable of and do have meaningful lives in their 80s and 90s and being better able to function then helps a lot. I find it sad that so many people have so little contact with the elderly that they give up on their lives in advance and joke about being vegetables, when it doesn't have to be that way. I suggest visiting a duplicate bridge tournament and watching what 80 year olds can do at the table -- the average age of such players is now 73 and these people are sharp! And funny, and enjoying their lives with others their ages, and having fun despite inevitable problems of aging. Why throw this possibility away in order to drink booze?

  10. skeptonomist

    "Brain volume goes slightly up if you drink very small amounts"

    I don't know what statistical contortions have been performed, but my first guess would be that the horizontal line represents the overall average. Since the overall average is some consumption more than zero, then zero consumption would be the level at value(s) above the line at the left extreme. This would mean that the effect at say one beer should be increased by that amount.

    This may be a wrong interpretation, but I don't see how drinking zero beers could have increased brain size unless they are testing people over time (which I don't think they are doing).

    1. climatemusings

      Note that 1 can of beer or 1 glass of wine counts as 2 units. So 4 drinks a week would put someone into this category.

  15. azumbrunn

    Here is my beef with this: Apart from the tiny effect size for modest drinkers: Who says less gray or white mass corresponds to reduced brain function? it is well known that women have smaller brains than men, yet there is no discernible difference in brain function.

  17. Leisureguy

    One interesting thing about alcohol I recently learned. The idea that drinking a small amount is better (in terms of overall health and longevity) than totally abstaining is an artifact of an experimental error. The studies that show this beneficial effect of drinking a little include among "non-drinkers" both lifelong abstainers and also those who quit drinking (often for reasons of health). If you remove former drinkers from the category of "non-drinkers," the supposed benefit of consuming a little alcohol vanishes. More info here: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-it-better-to-drink-little-alcohol-than-none-at-all/

    Note that beneath the video are tabs for a transcript and a list of the studies cited in the video.

    Still: it's a tradeoff. I am willing to accept a slightly shorter life for an occasional drink, but i now do drink rarely (and not much when I do).

  18. cld

    The issue is really some people have a terrible time giving up drinking.

    You simply have to remember it's poison, and sometime spend your childhood living with a chronic drunk.

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