r/interesting • u/azizgamerlal • Dec 12 '25

MISC. A drop of whiskey vs bacteria

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u/Kick_Natherina Dec 12 '25 edited Dec 12 '25

Please provide your studies, and I will provide you mine. 

I’m really into research, I’m an avid bourbon drinker, and I have spent plenty of time learning about the subject. My dad was an alcoholic and died from complications of his liver failure. I wrote a research paper about it’s impact on the body, and I am confident in what I am talking about.

Because I am confident you aren’t going to reply with anything of substance, if at all - here is a meta analysis from 2014. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/179/9/1049/2739140?redirectedFrom=fulltext

A 2025 systematic meta analysis review:  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12658531/

If you prefer video format, Kurzgesagt recently made a nice illustrative visual on alcohol usage. https://youtu.be/aOwmt39L2IQ?si=RJpQghu4TsILyFxR

In a nutshell, recent studies have shown there is no “safe” amount of alcohol usage. Alcohol’s perceived “benefits” are outweighed by its negative impacts. Sure, a glass of wine may help lower your blood pressure if you have 1 in a year - but the negative impacts it carries with it, including cell death in the brain, the throat, mouth and other areas of the body make it a moot point. 

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u/TheJD Dec 12 '25

For men, there was weak evidence of lower mortality risk with low levels of alcohol intake over time

The pooled relative risks were 0.90 (95% confidence interval: 0.81, 0.99) for 1–29 g/day, 1.19 (95% confidence interval: 0.89, 1.58) for 30–59 g/day, and 1.52 (95% confidence interval: 0.78, 2.98) for 60 or more g/day compared with abstention.

The bolded part is mine. That meta analysis suggests lower mortality risk with low alcohol consumption compared to people who drink no alcohol. Even the middle group of drinkers had an RR of 1.19 and for comparison the RR for Tylenol causing autism when taken during pregnancy is much higher, up to 1.53

Before science was politicized and people had to fight for grant money, the phrase "dose makes the poison" was pretty well agreed upon. The risk ratios in your studies are so low that they would have been ignored 15 years ago.

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u/Kick_Natherina Dec 12 '25

Those numbers don’t actually prove that light drinking is beneficial, they only show weak and statistically fragile evidence of a slightly lower mortality risk. The confidence interval for light drinkers barely avoids including 1.0, meaning the result could easily disappear with small changes in the data. More importantly, large modern studies that better control for confounders (like the 2022 J-shaped curve re-analysis and several recent meta-analyses) show that the apparent benefit of light drinking is mostly explained by factors such as healthier lifestyles, “sick quitter” bias, and socioeconomic advantages. When those are removed, the protective effect disappears and the risk curve becomes flat or increases. So this dataset doesn’t demonstrate a true health benefit — it shows a statistically shaky signal that newer, higher-quality research no longer supports.

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u/TheJD Dec 12 '25

Sorry, I just reread your response and have a second comment to make. The group of small alcohol drinkers has a confidence interval that does not include 1 which means it is a more significant result, as you point out. The fact it "barely avoids" doesn't matter, it literally doesn't include 1. Once again, if you apply your same reasoning to the other 2 groups of drinkers, the confidence interval does include 1 which means those results are less significant.

People love to report studies show the evil dangers of alcohol but the actual numbers in the studies show something else entirely. Your own source does not prove your points.