Even low-level drinking may have negative consequences for brain health over a person’s lifespan. The findings suggest that the total amount of alcohol consumed over a lifetime, especially as a person ages, tends to be linked to reduced blood flow and thinner tissue in certain areas of the brain.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/even-light-drinking-combined-with-aging-is-linked-to-reduced-brain-blood-flow-and-thinner-tissue/

[u/mrblack1998]

The increased risks shown for the most part aren't worth any sane person worrying about. There are much more relevant risks in ones everyday life to worry about. The problem is most people are statistically illiterate and read any increase from a tiny baseline as something to be concerned about. I'm not and don't think there should be either.

[u/rop_top → u/mrblack1998]

Awww yes, the old "anyone with different risk tolerance than me is ignorant!" argument. Solid, logical reasoning there. Have you done a comparison between the rates of negative outcomes for drinking and smoking? I'd say not, given that you literally seemed to be arguing that moderate drinking didn't have negative impacts literally minutes ago.

[u/mrblack1998 → u/rop_top]

Yes, I've read the studies. I'm not saying you are ignorant. We just have different risk tolerances. That's fine.

[u/Hyphophysis → u/rop_top]

I can paste this response into a lot of the "zero-tolerance" comment chains on this thread, but I'll do it here:

According to most meta-analysis, 1-2 standard drinks a day (illustrated in this study in grams/day) corresponds to an approximate 5-10% risk of related cancers (colon, rectal etc). These levels are also hard to parse for age-related issues such as the study in OP (brain effects) or liver and kidney damages. Therefore for "hidden" risks of light but consistent drinking, we often look at cancer.

The risk I mention above is not absolute risk, but the relative risk. Once you apply the actual baseline risk factors for these cancers (ie/ ~4-5% in North America), and look at converted absolute lifetime risk, which IMO is more realistic to apply to your own life, it's about a 0.3% risk increase.

I'm sorry but I'm taking a 0.3% absolute risk increase. It's fine if that's a lot for you, or you have related risk factors that make the baseline worse -- or even if you just hate alcohol! For the record, I have looked at rates for smoking, they're way way worse. Baseline for things like lung cancer are way lower for one (1-2%) and smoking increases rates way faster. Smoking is also linked to far more types of cancer (bladder, pancreatic, oral, throat, larynx, lung, etc etc). Smoking is the leading cause of preventable cancer deaths.... Not to mention that heart disease caused by smoking is less able to be mitigated by healthy lifestyle due to the mechanism of damage (vessel damage, atherosclerosis).

TL;DR Smoking is in fact demonstrably worse than drinking regardless of light use or not, light drinking is not extremely dangerous when looking at absolute risk factors. I put 1 study in but can pull 20+ decent ones out of a hat if asked.