Hello, and we welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinegel. And today,

we're going to poke some holes in the oft-repeated advice to consume lean sources of protein. But first,

I also wanted to share some questions and some comments that I received in response to my recent

episode on the risks of alcohol consumption. Steve, who is a long-term listener and also a medical

doctor, wrote me to point out that all-cause mortality, which is the statistic that was measured in

the global burden of disease study that I was talking about in that episode, all-cause mortality

is only one way to evaluate the potential harm of alcohol consumption. Alcohol consumption

may increase the risk of non-fatal diseases or disabilities or other harmful outcomes,

such as the loss of a job or a relationship. It can also increase the risk of harm to others,

as with alcohol-related automobile accidents, domestic violence, or sexual assault. And as Steve

writes, the psychological trauma and other adverse outcomes of this alcohol-potentiated behavior

are not covered in this study. And he's absolutely right about that. Whenever you're using statistics to

assess your own risk, it's really important to pay attention to which outcomes are and are not

accounted for in that analysis. And how closely the studied population matches your situation.

So this new analysis that I was reviewing does offer a more nuanced look at how drinking patterns

affect life expectancy across different regions of the globe and age groups. But these data do not

include non-fatal outcomes or the potential impact of your drinking patterns on others.

So thank you, Steve, for pointing that out. Noah sent a question that I frequently get regarding

guidelines for alcohol consumption. So the guidelines for low risk drinking are expressed in terms

of drinks per day. So one drink a day for women and two drinks for men. But what if you only drink

on the weekends? Noah writes, I'm not proposing that seven drinks in one night and nothing on the other

six days of the week would be equivalent to one drink a day. But what about two, three, or even four

...