So alcohol.

Yes.

There's, I mean, alcohol's been on a journey.

Yes.

It's been on a journey in terms of society's opinion about it.

Can you take me on that journey and tell me where we are now?

And when I'm saying that, I'm talking about society's opinion on its health benefits and what it is. And then also what we're getting wrong now about alcohol. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the journey of alcohol is fascinating. So first, I think we think of this as a relatively modern thing. But, you know, archaeologists have discovered, like, beer-making equipment in hunter-gatherers cave dwellings from 13,000 years ago. That's wild.

Wow.

Like 13,000 years of people figuring out how to make beer. You know, you look at China 9,000

years ago. It was really about like a spiritual journey or a social thing. It was never really

about health. At some point, we started talking about this as something that is good for your health.

Like drink red wine. It's going to improve your health.

And that's where I think we got wrong. And the reason why was actually from how we were looking at the data. So first, if you look at only one health condition, there are some health conditions where a moderate amount of alcohol actually improves your health. But it was also how people are conducting the studies. So in most of those studies, what people do is they take like a massive population, tens of thousands of people, where we have some data where they're reporting how much alcohol they used. And then we look at health risks over time. And scientists would want people into sort of non-drinkers versus light drinkers, moderate drinkers, or heavy drinkers. And what they're finding is that people who are drinking in the, even up to the moderate level, we're actually doing better than the people who weren't drinking at all. And so that was where that concept that drinking is good for your health came from. And so people talk about this like J-shaped curve, meaning that moderate drinkers actually have lower risks of health problems. And then it's really only when you start drinking very high levels that you start having more risk of health problems than people who don't drink at all. What they realize was wrong with that is that in the people who don't drink at all, many of those people are not drinking because they're actually really unhealthy for another reason. Like they might have heart failure and they like don't want to drink because they don't want it to mix with their medication. they might have had a history of alcohol use disorder and they're actually in recovery. So they've already had some damage from alcohol and they are not drinking because of that. And so when you change the reference group, you actually make the sort of group that you compare people to to people who very rarely drink. So it's not that they're not drinkers at all, but they drink, you know, very, very light levels. Then you start to see that those, like, health benefits of alcohol go away, especially if you look across all conditions. Are you telling me that there's no

healthy level of alcohol consumption? Yes, I would never say drinking alcohol is good for your health.

That doesn't mean that drinking at what we call low risk levels can't be a part of a healthy lifestyle.

So it's a slight shift that like don't fool yourself into thinking that drinking that glass of wine is like going to exercise for 30 minutes.

Like it's not something that's going to promote your health.

I think of it more like having dessert, eating bacon, going out in the sun, there are risks associated with

those activities. It doesn't mean that I would say you can never do any of that, but you need to

understand what the risks are and then make choices for yourself. So I look at this glass of wine here

and this pint of beer. If I drank one of these a day, not a huge amount, I think what people tend to think is they

think, well, it's only one.

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