because even just 1 drink of alcohol wipes out a large percent of your immune cells for hours or days, and then your hematopoietic cells rebuild them at the cost of telomere shorting
Say waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?
It’s a bit unclear from your context: are you asserting this for everyone or primarily for people who are abusing alcohol?
I do have to say, I’ve always been pretty confused by the inconclusive evidence that drinking may have some positive health effects. Maybe I just tolerate alcohol less than average, but I’ve often felt like I was just dosing myself with poison based on one or two drinks and how bleeeech I would generally feel the next morning. There have been a number of times when I’ve felt like this might be a bad hedonic cost/benefit trade off, but there are a number of beers whose taste I like enough that I haven’t really been tempted to just set a blanket no-booze policy.
In your judgement, is a blanket no-booze policy worth considering?
(I’m a pretty infrequent drinker currently: a heavy drinking week might see three or four units; most weeks are zero units.)
I used to drink literally none. I’m genetically predisposed to bad outcomes from alcoholism (my family has jokes about “brewery genes”) and teetotaling through my teen years is something I do NOT regret.
But statistics suggest that literally drinking absolutely no alcohol ever… isn’t correlated with maxxing your longevity (though: insert much debate here)? SO the current best theory I have for a possible mechanism (assuming it is even true) involves using short term brain damage as part of human bonding rituals.
More/better friends makes you happier, and hence longer lived. Seems legit. Then I figure: a few drinks a few times a year won’t matter that much? So I do drink sometimes in some social contexts, but I try to do it rarely and lightly. Enough to show that “in vino veritas” (and so on) reveals me to be a happy drunk instead of a mean drunk, but not much more than that. ONE glass of champagne to celebrate new years? Who am I to argue with tradition? <3
My memory (which is human and thus fallible) contains a study or two that were beautiful, with healthy mostly non-drinking people people who were clean for some time, then had before and after white blood cell counts, with a randomly assigned number of drinks, and they got a nice little dose response curve and time-to-recovery out of it.
My memory wants to say that maybe one drink depressed WBC counts by like 35%, with recovery within 1-3 days? Maybe the second drink got the number down to like 60% from peak? And by the sixth drink you mostly already blasted all the white blood cells that were going to die with the fifth drink already? That last 10%, or 5%, or 1% of white blood cells are hard to wipe out, and “100%” only has 100 percentage points inside of it to lose, which… is a finite number of points… so… yeah.
If literally ALL of them died with nothing anywhere to grow back to the right numbers… that seems like it would make alcohol way more fatal than it observably is?
Like you might need a blood transfusion to live after every binge drinking event in that case? Which people don’t need. So that can’t be how it works.
ButI can’t find the study (studies?) now so either the modern (crappy) google on the modern (crappy) net corpus is failing me, or my memory is bad?
Instead, all I can find right now is long term stuff from prestige farms (and second order similar content on long term processes) empirically showing a long term hand-wavy version of chronic abuse causing deep structural damage…
...but like: “duh”? And THESE don’t seem to mention telomeres or mechanistic connections between obvious short term and long term biological processes?
I don’t know.
Biology is a science, but it is a weird science. It is basically an attempt to reverse engineer a gajillion weird little gadgets designed by an insane god. The wrinkles have wrinkles, seemingly ad infinitum, but surely it has to bottom out SOMEWHERE and then make perfect sense eventually?
...
In terms of the VERY BIG picture, it is mechanistically plausible that it is useful to do a bit of a purge now and again? Exercise. Fasting. Variation. Hormetic stresses. Maybe “use it or lose it”?
Like my best guess for green tea’s mechanism of action on cancer reduction is that it mildly upregulates apoptosis and makes all cells just thatmuch extra willing to suspect they might be cancerous and press their own cellular suicide button. Seems scary to me (I stopped drinking green tea regularly when I found out), but green tea has a positive reputation, so who am I to say?
(Doctors used to purge blood all all the time, and it was never helpful, except when it was.)
Then there’s asparagus: it could be neurotoxic (at some doses) for a chunk of people… I dunno if I have the allele for that result, but even if I have the allele, I still do eat it sometimes, but only like one or two spears, young/weak/small, and only maybe once a year.
I hated asparagus as a kid, and kids tend to be smart about such things?
I heard from someone once that there are two species that can eat asparagus without dying: some bug that specializes in it, and humans, because humans have freakishly capable livers. This was uncited however, and maybe just word-of-mouth bullshit?
There’s an old wives tail that asparagus works as decent wart medicine, this jives with “anecdata” for me… but like… IF something can kill some small benign(?) cancers then it deserves serious respect in my book. Not “never”. Just “cautiously”?
Alcohol seems like it could hypothetically fit in here somewhere, maybe it has a use as a poison that usefully poisons the bad cells worse than it poisons the healthy cells if used rarely?
I think the standard use for alcohol in the super olden days as a water additive that kills microbiological infestations (not that they knew that it was doing this, because they didn’t have a germ theory of disease, so… what the hell?) but it doesn’t make sense to use it this way anymore, I think.
The thing you were supposed to do was “water” the wine I think… which means drinking more water, which is theoretically healthy (but in practice probably not), so maybe many modern humans (but not all) have genomes tuned by the last few millennia of agricultural evolution to tolerate drinking a half a glass of a fructose-like beverage per day, mixed with quite a bit of water?
Purging cells every day, when we KNOW that telomeres are a thing, doesn’t seem wise to me… but I know of zero studies aimed at optimizing any of this in any kind of sane way.
Basically, my real theory is basically to follow my cravings, try to AVOID eating unless I CRAVE some food or drink (and eat half of how much I think I want, then get seconds after 10 minutes if I still wanna), use common sense (liberally sprinkled with evolutionary bullshit), copy the diets of people similar to me who seem successful, and cross my fingers.
Basically, my real theory is basically to follow my cravings, try to AVOID eating unless I CRAVE some food or drink (and eat half of how much I think I want, then get seconds after 10 minutes if I still wanna), use common sense (liberally sprinkled with evolutionary bullshit), copy the diets of people similar to me who seem successful, and cross my fingers.
This closely accords with my intuition, the only part I haven’t been doing is the 10 min cool off for seconds. I’ll add that.
Say waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?
It’s a bit unclear from your context: are you asserting this for everyone or primarily for people who are abusing alcohol?
I do have to say, I’ve always been pretty confused by the inconclusive evidence that drinking may have some positive health effects. Maybe I just tolerate alcohol less than average, but I’ve often felt like I was just dosing myself with poison based on one or two drinks and how bleeeech I would generally feel the next morning. There have been a number of times when I’ve felt like this might be a bad hedonic cost/benefit trade off, but there are a number of beers whose taste I like enough that I haven’t really been tempted to just set a blanket no-booze policy.
In your judgement, is a blanket no-booze policy worth considering? (I’m a pretty infrequent drinker currently: a heavy drinking week might see three or four units; most weeks are zero units.)
I used to drink literally none. I’m genetically predisposed to bad outcomes from alcoholism (my family has jokes about “brewery genes”) and teetotaling through my teen years is something I do NOT regret.
But statistics suggest that literally drinking absolutely no alcohol ever… isn’t correlated with maxxing your longevity (though: insert much debate here)? SO the current best theory I have for a possible mechanism (assuming it is even true) involves using short term brain damage as part of human bonding rituals.
More/better friends makes you happier, and hence longer lived. Seems legit. Then I figure: a few drinks a few times a year won’t matter that much? So I do drink sometimes in some social contexts, but I try to do it rarely and lightly. Enough to show that “in vino veritas” (and so on) reveals me to be a happy drunk instead of a mean drunk, but not much more than that. ONE glass of champagne to celebrate new years? Who am I to argue with tradition? <3
My memory (which is human and thus fallible) contains a study or two that were beautiful, with healthy mostly non-drinking people people who were clean for some time, then had before and after white blood cell counts, with a randomly assigned number of drinks, and they got a nice little dose response curve and time-to-recovery out of it.
My memory wants to say that maybe one drink depressed WBC counts by like 35%, with recovery within 1-3 days? Maybe the second drink got the number down to like 60% from peak? And by the sixth drink you mostly already blasted all the white blood cells that were going to die with the fifth drink already? That last 10%, or 5%, or 1% of white blood cells are hard to wipe out, and “100%” only has 100 percentage points inside of it to lose, which… is a finite number of points… so… yeah.
If literally ALL of them died with nothing anywhere to grow back to the right numbers… that seems like it would make alcohol way more fatal than it observably is?
Like you might need a blood transfusion to live after every binge drinking event in that case? Which people don’t need. So that can’t be how it works.
But I can’t find the study (studies?) now so either the modern (crappy) google on the modern (crappy) net corpus is failing me, or my memory is bad?
Instead, all I can find right now is long term stuff from prestige farms (and second order similar content on long term processes) empirically showing a long term hand-wavy version of chronic abuse causing deep structural damage…
...but like: “duh”? And THESE don’t seem to mention telomeres or mechanistic connections between obvious short term and long term biological processes?
I don’t know.
Biology is a science, but it is a weird science. It is basically an attempt to reverse engineer a gajillion weird little gadgets designed by an insane god. The wrinkles have wrinkles, seemingly ad infinitum, but surely it has to bottom out SOMEWHERE and then make perfect sense eventually?
...
In terms of the VERY BIG picture, it is mechanistically plausible that it is useful to do a bit of a purge now and again? Exercise. Fasting. Variation. Hormetic stresses. Maybe “use it or lose it”?
Like my best guess for green tea’s mechanism of action on cancer reduction is that it mildly upregulates apoptosis and makes all cells just that much extra willing to suspect they might be cancerous and press their own cellular suicide button. Seems scary to me (I stopped drinking green tea regularly when I found out), but green tea has a positive reputation, so who am I to say?
(Doctors used to purge blood all all the time, and it was never helpful, except when it was.)
Then there’s asparagus: it could be neurotoxic (at some doses) for a chunk of people… I dunno if I have the allele for that result, but even if I have the allele, I still do eat it sometimes, but only like one or two spears, young/weak/small, and only maybe once a year.
I hated asparagus as a kid, and kids tend to be smart about such things?
I heard from someone once that there are two species that can eat asparagus without dying: some bug that specializes in it, and humans, because humans have freakishly capable livers. This was uncited however, and maybe just word-of-mouth bullshit?
There’s an old wives tail that asparagus works as decent wart medicine, this jives with “anecdata” for me… but like… IF something can kill some small benign(?) cancers then it deserves serious respect in my book. Not “never”. Just “cautiously”?
Alcohol seems like it could hypothetically fit in here somewhere, maybe it has a use as a poison that usefully poisons the bad cells worse than it poisons the healthy cells if used rarely?
I think the standard use for alcohol in the super olden days as a water additive that kills microbiological infestations (not that they knew that it was doing this, because they didn’t have a germ theory of disease, so… what the hell?) but it doesn’t make sense to use it this way anymore, I think.
Nowadays the drinking supply is dosed with chlorine instead, so thank goodness for science!
The thing you were supposed to do was “water” the wine I think… which means drinking more water, which is theoretically healthy (but in practice probably not), so maybe many modern humans (but not all) have genomes tuned by the last few millennia of agricultural evolution to tolerate drinking a half a glass of a fructose-like beverage per day, mixed with quite a bit of water?
Purging cells every day, when we KNOW that telomeres are a thing, doesn’t seem wise to me… but I know of zero studies aimed at optimizing any of this in any kind of sane way.
Basically, my real theory is basically to follow my cravings, try to AVOID eating unless I CRAVE some food or drink (and eat half of how much I think I want, then get seconds after 10 minutes if I still wanna), use common sense (liberally sprinkled with evolutionary bullshit), copy the diets of people similar to me who seem successful, and cross my fingers.
Thank you for the info dump.
This closely accords with my intuition, the only part I haven’t been doing is the 10 min cool off for seconds. I’ll add that.
Thank you. : )