No. of Recommendations: 9
I personally think that having 3-4 beers a week isn’t likely to be harmful to your health, especially given the relatively low alcohol content of around 4%.
In the short-term, I agree with this entirely. In fact there are many articles that continue to confirm that light drinking is not a problem. However, owing to second-order, and third-order effects, I'm not so sure, and I think this superficial analysis is very misleading.
As someone who never drinks alcohol, and I observe people drinking around me and how their habits change over time, I would say that those having a beers every day or two are in the higher risk category than what they may think. One can slip into more regular beers - not now, but when some life conditions change a little at some random point in the future - and then this fuels either addiction or greater ease at slipping into other addictions.
I recently saw an very wonderful former business colleague who started with just regular beers as above, which changed over time to being more frequent, and he proudly declared occasionally it was not effecting his work even when a little drunk. Then five years later, he became full addicted and it completely ruined his life (his girlfriend left, his customers left, his business deteriorated and he was on the verge of suicide). If he hadn't started with light beer drinking as the starting point, his life definitely would not have become ruined.
Those that are already addicted to alcohol are not "high risk" in this sense, as they are already addicted so any health danger propaganda will be completely irrelevant to them and just ignored.
Alcohol advertising is banned is most countries. However alcohol is legal and (for now) not looked down upon in our western cultures, a lot of that relating to a long history of state taxes taken from alcohol. Yet it actually it is a fully blown additive drug.
Alcohol is a toxic, psychoactive, and dependence-producing substance and has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer decades ago – this is the highest risk group, which also includes asbestos, radiation and tobacco.
Alcohol is also a major catalyst, even if taken lightly such as having an occasional beer or two, when used in combination with other drugs, causing cardiotoxic effects.
That's nice, but sounds irrelevant to most light drinkers, as they know that drinking lightly doesn't cause health problems.
The idea that is missed is that heavy drinking (as an addiction) starts with an addiction to light alcohol drinking (that is - alcohol alone) forming the initial addiction physical pathways in the brain.
You won't slip into heavier drinking now whilst all is well, but if some difficulties arise in your life, or if you just get bored and innocently drink a few more, and then the brain starts to get heavily programmed. The addiction is completely physical of course, and not something you can control by just relying on your frontal lobe executive function.
- Manlobbi
