And I thought booze was good for you!
Alcohol as harmful as smoking, study warns
Alcohol causes almost as many deaths and disabilities worldwide as smoking or high-blood pressure, a study warns.
Alcohol causes 4 per cent of diseases worldwide, compared to 4.1 per cent for tobacco, a study suggests.
In this week's issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, an international team of researchers points out that alcohol is linked to more than 60 different medical conditions.
"Overall, four per cent of the global burden of disease is attributable to alcohol, 4.1 per cent to tobacco and 4.4 per cent to high blood pressure," writes lead researcher Robin Room, of Stockholm University in Sweden.
"In most cases, alcohol has a detrimental effect on health."
2 Comments:
Most of the studies Carlos have cited, showing beneficial effects of beer or wine, were predicated on one or two drinks a day. Based on this, I suspect the harmful results shown by the Lancet study are almost all the result of chronic over-use.
In other words, there appears to be a level of alcohol use which has little or no net harmful effect. This doesn't seem to be true of tobacco. Also, alcohol use in small to moderate quantities has no perceptible effect on other people in the vicinity, unlike tobacco smoke. So there's a logical reason for some disparity in the legal and social treatment of the two.
That said, I do hold that people who want to smoke have a right to do so as long as they do so at their own expense, either outdoors or anywhere where the owner of the property doesn't mind.
For the record, that was me listed as "anonymous" above.
Felix
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