[AndrewKemendo]

Yes and...

This is not ambiguous: There is no safe amount that does not affect health.[1]

"We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,"

It is possible that a totally sober and mentally healthy person can determine that the benefits of alcohol counterbalance the health risks. I've heard a dozen meandering explanations here and they all boil down to "I like it and it seems to be helping my life more than hurting it." That seems reasonable.

However not everyone has the same risk profile, or even the same moral grounding, so demonstrating to others that there are few relative risks to alcohol consumption or not (based on your personal threat model) biases the threat models of others.

It helps nothing to continue to reject some of the strongest correlations we have and risks imbuing incorrect epistemic biases to others via demonstration. Accept the fact that you are taking a risk instead of trying to brush off the scientific consensus and be vocal about the risks given the fact that this literature is not accessible to most people.

[1]https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...

[archagon]

I feel like these kinds of statements are not very helpful. Knowing that even a single drop of alcohol is harmful without calibrating that risk does not give me enough information to alter my behavior. Fermented foods are inherently a bit alcoholic; does eating them mean I'm doomed? If not, then at what point does imbibing alcohol turn into a real health hazard? What are the risks compared to, say, eating prosciutto or grilled meats?

[AndrewKemendo]

Yes well luckily there’s an entire field dedicated to this problem: actuarial science

It’s pretty accurate at this point

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science

[aeternum]

This is based off a meta analysis and the problem with those is you can filter the data to prove almost anything you want.

Many other studies have found a j-curve effect. So there is ambiguity, and there likely will be until someone does a long-term randomized controlled trial which is incredibly difficult.

[maxerickson]

In an absolute sense, it also isn't safe to take a sip of water.

[AndrewKemendo]

No these aren’t the same risk calculations and in fact use different measurement language - this is important because it’s an actual argument that is fallacious and regularly used.

This is the same poorly argued version of: “Milk is a gateway drug” when we’re evaluating a claim like “x% of y users used z drug before starting y, therefore z induces y” but actually irrelevant when asking for causal precursors.

That is a completely separate type of claim and argument.

“Risk to health” increases with abstention of water, the direct opposite of the mechanism for alcohol.

[Etheryte]

Your own argument is exactly the same though, just for alcohol.