I would like a ban on advertising, too.
I’d like a ban on all forms of advertising.
Marketing is nothing more than getting people to buy stuff they do not need.
It is the reason we live in a consumer culture, and is the force behind some of the biggest problems humanity faces today.
Hell yes!
The world would look so SO much better with advertising gone.
Now we have to deal with 5x50 meters (sigh, 15 by 150 foot) video screens that illuminate the night sky and blind you while you are driving, but hey, BUY NIKE!
This is not even mentioning brands buying up buildings and clubs and hospitals and what-not so that they can plaster their name over it. It sucks.
Brand recognition has been a bane of our existence for the past century
I might be up for a very VERY strictly limited form of advertising, limited to only a few spaces and times, but I’d love it that brands only show up when I ask them to. I need to buy a car? If I search “I want to buy a car” or something like that, then you can show me brands. Hell, even there, screw the shitty commercials, just show me the brand names and that’s it.
Ha! It’s not just that!
Where I live, they’ve got some sort of weird “The Future Is Electric” campaign going on. It’s on the busses, there’s a billboard of one near my place, and hell, that one’s powered so it shines brighter than the street lights at night!
And what is it advertising? I have no idea. Just that our province paid for it. The province. For at least one powered, custom billboard along with who knows how many regular ads. For something that I can’t even start figuring out.
Ads aren’t just ugly and a cheap way to make people spend money on things that they don’t need or even make their lives worse, but our tax dollars are spend on meaningless ads when there’s so many social and economic issues that are being actively ignored or even caused by the current governments.
I think alcohol advertising will eventually be banned but it’ll take a long time. Governments are addicted to the revenues.
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https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/publicit/codesalco.htm
No advertising to children is the most important restriction and several guidelines address this issue
Poster asked america, you provided canadian stats. Just fyi’s
User is I would assume German, asking on a Canadian instance, and on post about a Canadian news. I’d say that’s pretty reasonable. Canadian is part of America, as well as the USA.
You are right. I misread America as “North America”, but America means USA. In the USA, they have freedom of speech, more so than Canada, the government can’t restrict advertising that much. Their industry is mostly self-regulating, for example: https://www.beerinstitute.org/policy-responsibility/responsibility/advertising-marketing-code/
When the cigarette companies decided they were losing money by advertising on TV they got it banned.
America means USA
It also refers to the combined area of North and South America. This the more likely usage here, as who would ask about whether or not the USA has such regulation in a Canadian forum? That would have no relevance.
North, South, and Central America! 😉
You must be right since I originally included Canada in “America”.
Canada is within America. America is exceedingly broad, with so many different jurisdictions, all with their own rules. There is no single answer as to what the rules are across all of America. Since this is a Canadian forum, Canada was a reasonable choice to narrow down to.
There is still room for you to dive into some of those other jurisdictions, if you find it pertinent, but I expect nobody here actually cares about what is going on in, say, Mexico.
Canada is within the continent of North America.
The concept of ‘America’ these days does not apply to continental plates, and you know that as well as i do.
You know what I meant, and you are arguing disingenuously. We can all see it.
Canada is within the continent of North America.
And North America is located within America.
The concept of ‘America’ these days does not apply to continental plates
The thing is, we keep a record of how words are commonly used, and that record tells that it absolutely does refer to a set of continents. But, I know, let’s not let facts and figures get in the way of random internet nonsense.
You know what I meant
Yes, I know you meant it in jest. Nobody would actually take time out of their day to write such a comment earnestly. We can all see that.
🙄
The fact that wine and beer bottles are exempt from those Nutrition Facts labels is utter nonsense.
If people knew how much sugar and calories are in their drink maybe they would think twice
There are nutrition labels on alcohol in Europe, but people there drink as much as here.
Europe drinks way more alcohol than North America
Excerpt from the article:
If you feel that Europeans drink a lot, your hunch is correct: people across the continent consume more alcohol than in any other part of the world. Each year in Europe, every person aged 15 and over consumes, on average, 9.5 litres of pure alcohol, which is equivalent to around 190 litres of beer, 80 litres of wine or 24 litres of spirits. That’s according to the 2021 European health report by the World Health Organization (WHO).
24 litres of spirits is about 4 bottles of whiskey or vodka every 3 weeks.
That does seem like a lot to me.
wouldn’t that come out as 2 bottles per month?
750ml is the typical size of a bottle, so it would be more like 32 bottles per year, or 2.67 bottles per month.
In beer form, it’s a bout a pint per day. Not too bad actually. I probably average close to that, since I’ll have a can of beer most nights, and a few pints and/or cocktails on weekends.
It’s so relative. That sounds terrible to me. I however might drink 5 drinks a year.
Yup, just checked my beer. Lists ingredients and calories. In 2 langauges!
The cans of beer that I buy have ingredients and nutrition info like a soda can does.
Haven’t seen any on liquor bottles though.
I don’t have any liquor bottles, but my wine bottles have ingredients info, but no nutrition info.
Depends on from where they were sourced.
My Itallian red wine has nutritional info, French sourced white wine has nutritional info, American sourced red wine has nothing.
A short search states that the US doesnt have to have labels on alcohol because it’s not regulated by the FDA.
In Canada beer alcohol isn’t required to have nutritional info.
Not having to list ingredients is a real pain if you have uncommon food allergies.
Alcohol is required to list ingredients and allergy information.
I was drinking a while claw with my mother-in-law, and reflected that 100 calories was pretty good.
She responded she preferred her normal vodka sodas because they have 0 calories…
But then when you do see the nutrition label, it ends up acting as an ad that it’s a healthier drink.
Meanwhile cannabis beverages are required to have:
-Nutrition facts including calories, sugar, etc.
-Gigantic yellow warning with random health warning (e.g., don’t use if pregnant)
-Huge red stop sign cannabis leaf logo
-KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN
-Big pain in the ass plastic childproof thing
None of these required on a can of beer.
From a harm reduction perspective, it’s a massive failure. Many cannabis beverages have very low nearly zero calories, sugar-free. For your physical health they are almost certainly less harmful than alcohol and I know many people would enjoy them as an alternative to alcohol.
We have faced a similar failure in harm reduction strategy regarding vaping versus tobacco. I think in both cases it’s a result of vested interests (tax revenue, lobbying, don’t know) trumping what is best for people.
Cannabis, unlike alcohol and tobacco, has a high chance of causing long term and devastating effects on youth. This is a fact proven by science. Ease of access to alcohol should be heavily reduced and warnings should be places on them, Conservative ran alcohol lobbies always block that idea.
Vaping has been scientifically proven to be just as bad, if not worse for you health not to mention the negative environmental factor. It should follow the same path as tobaccos; no branding, no labels, health warning, removal of flavors, fines for vaping in public spaces.
high chance of causing long term and devastating effects on youth.
There is a substantial body of evidence proving alcohol is extremely bad for brain development
I’m only aware of studies of the parents drinking while pregnant. Either way, I’m already in favour of higher control on alcohol.
Surprised to hear someone so confidently asserting that more prohibition is necessary. None of what you suggested really aligns with harm reduction and I would argue that more restrictions on vaping and on alcohol would backfire in terms of black market availability and less regulatory oversight.
I’m unaware of the proof that vaping is as bad or worse than tobacco. My understanding is that the consensus is vaping, while harmful, is significantly less harmful than smoking tobacco. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/vaping-substantially-less-harmful-than-smoking-largest-review-of-its-kind-finds
And for the record, typically how it works when you want to make a claim about proof and evidence is that you cite your sources. You can’t simply use hyperbolic language, wave your hands and say the magic word “science” and expect people to just believe you.
I never said anything about prohibition but stricter regulation.
And sugar. Off topic a bit, but my addiction is sugar and some reminders might make the occasional difference.
One of the most overlooked influences on overall health and nutrition. Many people are not fully aware of their full intake. A lot of processed foods are 10% or more sugar by weight including breads, yogurts, and cereals. A few grams in everything you eat can really add up to a lot over the day.
A more noticeable warning label of this food is x% of recomended sugar intake could help, but good luck forcing a corporation to do anything that could reduce sales.
On US labels it has the percentage of daily intake for added sugars not all sugars. So there is some info on nutrition labels but everyone’s ‘daily’ intake is different and is usually more than on the label.
I switched from coca cola to tea sweetened with a little honey, and one day I just dropped the honey. Without the coke, I think I’ve cut about 80% of my sugar intake. Now I drink loads of tea every day and even when we go to a fast food I will skip sugar beverages.
Just cover every edible product with pictures from medizzy. Problem solved.
They did that with smoking, I see zero results. I see people looking at those scary pictures and go “huh…” and then light a cigarette to get rid of the anxiety that that image gave them.
That shit exists to make non-smokers feel good. It generally takes a viewpoint change to quit.
Before I quit I would just put painters tape over the picture so I didn’t have to look at it. I didn’t want to carry around pictures of diseased body parts all day.
Exception to this being the one with the droopy cigarette for ED. It was funny.
Anyway I don’t think those warnings influenced my quitting at all, because I avoided looking at them.
Or to the leading cause of death of Canadians: dietary cholesterol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY0UY3FwoW4
The leading cause of death of Canadians can be eliminated strictly through diet and avoiding animal products that contain cholesterol. And yet we pour millions of dollars into research each year for cutting edge new drugs that give you (so claimed) a 20% reduction in heart attacks, while having dozens of unwanted side effects.
If you’re relying on the government and industry to teach you how to be healthy and to provide the tools you need to do it, you’re going to die young.
Dietary cholesterol isn’t well correlated with serum cholesterol, which is what the paper you’ve linked is about. It even veers off into the natural conclusion if you believe that serum cholesterol is the only thing that matters: statin prescriptions for everyone!
For most people the level of cholesterol in food has little effect on blood cholesterol.
Fat, on the other hand…
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For most people the level of cholesterol in food has little effect on blood cholesterol.
I should have said dietary animal fats (including cholesterol) leading to serum cholesterol instead of dietary cholesterol and I didn’t catch the point you were making right away
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“I don’t want to say that there are necessarily equivalent health risks,”
I mean, they said it themselves. Drinking responsibly and in moderation poses no recorded long-term health risks. But even 1 cigarette a day can cause serious harm.
Not quite. Even the accepted amount poses increased threats to being diagnosed with cancer (it is a carcinogen at the end of the day): https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohols-effects-body
It is incredibly worse with breast cancer too.
“Evidence is consistent that intake, even intake of less than 10-15 grams per day, is associated with increased risk of this disease”
https://arcr.niaaa.nih.gov/volume/40/2/alcohols-effects-breast-cancer-women
The published “safe” levels of alcohol are generally completely arbitrary:
That study is a major failure in one key respect: Europeans drink far more than North Americans on average … and have longer lifespans than North Americans on average.
Perhaps there is something coughobesitycough that might be better to address first instead of going full metal Karen on people who enjoy a tipple at the pub at the end of a day?
And we Europeans would have an even longer lifespan if we didn’t drink literal poison.
I get it, it is fun. I partake in it every so often.
But don’t claim alcohol isn’t harmful. It is one of the most harmful drugs to your body and to society. Even worse than heroin. According to a UK study.
Don’t forget that 60% of aggression where the police needs to intervene has to do with alcohol.
Aggressive drunkenness is cultural.
Drunks here get loud and maudlin, but not aggressive; nowhere near the extent of, say, British drunkards or Canadian ones, or American ones. Same in Japan, incidentally, and Korea.
Alcohol reduces your inhibitions. What’s being inhibited is purely on the person being exposed and the culture they’re from.
It looks harmless, since you need to drink in order to stay alive.
But alcohol is nothing more than just poison. Which is why it gives our body the sensation of being poisoned.
And it works in contrary, since it actively dehydrates the body.
Lobbying
I mean, aren’t the cigarette companies famous for being extreme lobbyists?
They did, if you look at late 20th century history. The lobbying and propaganda they did at the time was insane, but there was only so much they could do when people were dying from lung cancer, had trouble breathing, and even chewing tobacco was known to cause mouth cancer.
They simply gave up trying so hard in the west and concentrated efforts in emerging markets. Do you remember the infamous video of the smoking baby a few years ago? Shit like that’s eerily common in places like Indonesia.
Because it would be weird reading that smoking alcohol is dangerous for pregnant women.
Because those health warnings are meaningless to begin with. We know it’s bad for us, we don’t need a nanny state to hold our hands at the same time.
We know it’s bad for us
You have the knowledge in the back of your mind. The warnings make you have it in active thought.
we don’t need a nanny state
Do you truly believe consumers usually/always make rational and reasonable decisions, that don’t go against their own interests?
You have the knowledge in the back of your mind. The warnings make you have it in active thought.
What kind of manipulative power trip behavior control bullshit logic is this?
Do you truly believe consumers usually/always make rational and reasonable decisions, that don’t go against their own interests?
Who the fuck cares? I decide how I live my life. If you want to wear bubble wrap and consume nothing but distilled water and unflavored soy bean paste so you can totally live forever and never need medical treatment, have at.
I’d rather live.
How would warnings stop you from that? It’s informative text, it can’t hurt you. Not any more than the alcohol itself.
I would rather my government spend my tax dollars solving real problems, not creating hoops for companies to jump through so people can ignore them (which is your narrative, in reality, it is intended to stagmatize the product and the people who consume the product and try to shame them into stopping).
That’s false, these warnings are successful ib preventing people from consuming the drug and therefore directly decreasing healthcare costs for society.
In fact, some countries pursue it even further, mandating bland packaging for cigarettes. This is especially effective in preventing minors from smoking.
Sounds like our are adept “ib” being a giant fascist tool who relishes the idea of getting some degenerates to stop drinking an smoking. Like savages.
sounds like regulatory capture to me: increase the bar to establish a brand so that only established brands dominate the market place. laws are bad and there should only be fewer of them.
…how does that apply to labels
if I only needed to scrawl an abv and my signature on my wine before, and now I need a printed label, my cost increases.
And coffee, and butter, and sugar, and artificial sweeteners, and cannabis, and cars.,. prohibition is stupid. Mind your own fucking business. Stop trying to control others.
It’s just a warning label not a prohibition
Alright, if that is true, and its not a baby step towards prohibition, let me fill you in on it. We fucking know and we don’t fucking care.
Stop wasting government time and resources on empty soapboxing.
We know what the propaganda says.
Slippery slope fallacy. Also a lot of people actually don’t know that alcohol causes cancer and heart disease as well as homicide, etc. A lot of gullible people drink it because they are socially led to believe that it’s OK or perhaps even necessary, but these are not thinking or informed people. The fact that you call legitimate health information about alcohol “propaganda” shows that you’re not really in the “know” camp, doesn’t it?
Alcohol causes HOMICIDE?!
Jesus, can I have whatever you are smoking?
Not smoking, drinking
Slippery slope fallacy.
Argument from fallacy. Just because an argument contains a fallacy doen not mean that its conclusion is false. In this context I feel like it would be much more effective to point out that cigarettes are totally unnecessary, while owning a car (depending on where you live) is not. Putting a warning label on something like cigarettes is not comparable to putting warning signs on something that you actively need to survive.
“[cars] something that you actively need to survive.”
You almost just made me spit out my beer.
“[cars] (depending on where you live) something you actively need to survive.” Seems like you conveniently forgot something there. If you live in a place where you can walk to work and the grocery store that’s amazing for you! For many people having a vehicle is not a choice, but a necessity.
Uber.
Let me say again, Uber.
Busses, trains, scooters, electric vehicles of any kind.
I’m not saying electric means no fossil fuel emissions of any kind. Almost everywhere is feeling varying growing pains exploring how to responsibly keep an ever more drawn upon electric grid charged.
I’m saying gas fueled cars need to go away, not yesterday, but at least 15 years ago.
Gas cars are what we as a species NEED to quit.
Simple vices pale in comparison.
If this was meant to invalidate my argument:
Red herring fallacy
Just invoking a simple fallacy without establishing it within the context is making a red herring of fallacies themselves.
Sure I’ll establish it with in context. Just because “other things are also dangerous” doesn’t mean warning should not be on the label of a known carcinogen. This is coming from someone who drinks more than he should.
Putting a warning on the label of a product known to cause harm isn’t “controlling others”. You are free to still consume the product. It is allowing you to make an informed choice, even if you are unaware or unable to access that information from other sources.
- I am in the US, and we have warnings but no nutritional facts on alcohol. In practice, I don’t like wasting government time creating restrictions on labeling just so they can be ignored, because the real reason for it is to baby step at making it a bespoken cultural norm that it is bad, therefore it should be banned and people who partake are bad by association.
I think nutrition facts should be on everything, and if there is NO “hey kiddies, this is alcohol” on the can, okay, there can be one. Before I checked the context myself, I thought this was a “put pictures of tumors on cigarette packs, the simple warning isn’t good enough!” kind of conversation.
- Discounting my comment in the conversation of specifically putting warnings on alcohol as “slippery slope fallacy” takes all the other stuff I just mentioned out of the equation. Just like a simple “Alcohol can cause X” on the can, putting a simple “Butter causes high cholesterol and heart failure” is also a good idea. putting a simple “Caffeine causes addiction and vascular issues” is also a good idea. Putting a “Fossil Fuel Emissions cause cancer and global warming” on the gas pump/gas cap cover on your car is a good idea.
I guess my point is that putting “Warning: Hot” on coffee cups is a waste of both government and private business resources. It does have some minimal merit though, but where do you start? I would be starting with Fossil Fuels. Those seem the most pressing and devastating of hazards we need to be addressing. If you are fixated on smokes and alcohol first, I think you have lost the plot.
It IS possible to establish basic simple warnings on everything that should have them though. Not doing that, to me, reeks of pushing for prohibition.
I agree with you that prohibition isn’t the way to do things. In my opinion the war on drugs is a waste of tax payers money and more importantly human life stuck behind bars. If you are speaking against criminalization of substances I’m with you. I’m however, not against harm reduction and education, including warning labels on products that are harmful.
Sounds like we are really close to meeting in the middle, I’m just a little more cautious about one part than you are and you are a little more cautious than me on a different part.
Cheers!
Artificial sweeteners are very safe and sugar is carbohydrates, which you almost need for energy and a healthy diet. Coffee and butter is also quite safe.
But alcohol and tobacco? Any amount is harmful. Warnings wouldn’t be unreasonable for people to make more informed decisions. You’d be surprised at how many think alcohol is harmless. And its stuff you quite literally don’t need to live.
You clearly don’t follow the news and aren’t very educated on the topic of carcinogens.
Artificial Sweeteners are being found to be carcinogenic. Sugar causes obesity and diabetes. Coffee is addictive and causes vascular disorders. Butter causes high cholesterol and heart attacks.
Tobacco and alcohol have no notable adverse impacts for at least 20 to 40 years (unless you drink to the point of alcohol poisoning, that is immediate).
You clearly aren’t interested in knowledge or having a productive conversation. You just want to do the propagandist prohibitionist circlejerk.
Not really equivalent. Smoking permanently leaves all kind of nasty shit in your lungs and causes cancer. Also very addictive, making moderation physically difficult (alcohol can also be addictive but not to the same extremes). Alcohol in moderation isn’t really an issue. Pushing it more can give your liver a bad time, but as long as you give it a break before the point of disease it can bounce right back.
There is a societal problem especially in the UK in that it’s seen as a sort of matter of pride to throw moderation out of the window and get as wasted as possible, but I have my doubts that graphic health warnings will do much about that. Either way it’s more an effect of society ignoring and sometimes even shaming moderation (how many times have you been shamed for going home before you fall over on a work’s night out) than the alcohol itself.
Smoking does not permanently leave anything in your lungs. The lungs constantly self clean and I believe after 10 years, all damage from any amount of smoking is removed.
The scarring from all the heavy coughing etc?
Still, rather not have all that sitting there for 10 years. The liver recovers from a few pints a lot quicker I believe, and even in the less favourable case of a fatty liver, a matter of weeks of abstienence rather than years. Disease of either, is probably a more dangerous situation.
Warnings now do appear on the back of alcohol in the EU but they’re usually small things on the back of the label stating the units of alcohol in the bottle & warning about drinking while pregnant or whatever.
Problem with these is they state some tiny amount equivalent to like half a glass of wine as the most you should have in a day, even though in the real world… basically anyone who drinks has a at least a little bit more than that and the moderate majority are fine and not on death’s door. I know 70 and 80 year olds in the pub who must drink 10+ units a day (I actually notice the oldies are the worst for wanting like 6%+ ABV beers) and are still there doing fine. So it has a bit of a “boy who cried wolf” effect to slap warnings on about drinking more than 14 units a week / 2 a day / whatever when at least in the UK like “everyone” drinks more than that. It just becomes a lauging stock, “look at that silly over-cautious nanny label”. If there should be any warning, IMO it’d be not to binge. If you can’t remember what happened the next morning, you drank too much, and it’s if you do that too often that it’s a major health risk.
Drinking more than these labelled amounts isn’t good for you, but health warnings should be more closely aligned to “really bad for you” to be taken seriously imo.
Well, because even those tiny amounts have a negative effect on your body. Instead of laughing about it, maybe you should consider, that you and everyone around you consumes too much alcohol? It’s exactly the 1 beer a day, that leads to addiction (and, possibly, cancer).
He’s talking about how the standard unit of alcohol definition bears no resemblance to anything people actually interact with in the real world. For example, one unit of alcohol is ~200mL of a typical beer. When was the last time you saw beer sold in 200mL containers?
He is saying that if you want to communicate such ideas to people you need to speak to them at their level, not something geared towards scientists. If you ask random people on the street how much beer one drink is, they will likely tell you it is one pint (473mL), when in reality that is more than two drinks.
And when one finds out that, they are not going to reel in horror, they are going to laugh at how out of touch someone was to communicate that idea so poorly.
More specifically (btw pint = 568ml) when I said about laughing at it I meant more at how it’s so little you might as well not drink at all. Which I get is their point as this poster obviously loathes alcohol and thinks it’s the most dangerous thing in the world, but yet we’re not all dropping left and right as you’d expect. If it was that dangerous the UK population would’ve been wiped out by now.
No one, literally no one, goes out and has half a pint then says “well the label says that’s too much so I’m off home”. That’s where, right or wrong, the suggestion is kind of laughable.
It’s an ideal, perhaps. But it’s such a tight ideal that no one will even try to follow it. Maybe if they aimed for “better” rather than “almost perfect” (with perfection being teetotality) they’d have more success. A label more like “if you can’t remember what happened when you wake up tomorrow, you’re severely harming your health” would at least get some of those in the biggest danger to rein it in a bit.
People will still laugh, even if scientists say, that half a beer (250ml) is already bad for you. Scientists need to present facts, if people head their conclusions or not, is not really their problem in most cases. Our society is deeply ingrained with alcohol abuse. How do you think scientists or science journalism should present the fact, that even small amounts of alcohol are detrimental to your health, to the general public?
How do you think scientists or science journalism should present the fact, that even small amounts of alcohol are detrimental to your health, to the general public?
Before we get too deep, is the intent to present the facts, or to guide behaviour? I always took it was the latter, but you could be right that it is the former. In which case, whatever we’re doing is fine. The facts are out there. If people want to laugh at the facts, so be it.
Facts don’t guide behaviour, though. Human behaviour is guided by emulation of those envied in society. More simply, whatever a rich person does, the general public will soon try to copy them. And, indeed, alcohol has shown be to central to fortunes. That data shows a higher rate of alcohol use amongst those who are considered rich. In fact, some studies suggest that fortunes are built on the social connections greased by the lowering of inhibitions caused by alcohol.
If the intent is to guide behaviour, scientists can develop something to see fortunes more likely to end up in the hands of the teetotallers. If sipping water in their mother’s basement and not getting completely blasted at the Kentucky Derby was what rich people did, attitudes would change pretty quickly.
Of course, the data also shows a higher rate of alcohol use amongst those who succeed in academia ([1] i.e. the scientists themselves) ([2] something also correlated with being wealthier), so it may not be something they have an interest in.
I wholly agree with the author of this article, but implementing something like this will meet a lot of resistance. Let’s not forget that cigarettes are a relatively new phenomenon, whereas alcohol is something we’ve consumed as a species since prehistoric times. There are a lot of cultural, social, and historical ties to the use of alcohol that people won’t let go easily and will make any attempt to reduce alcohol consumption an uphill battle.
Alcohol is a literal fucking toxin
Almost. It’s that first breakdown step of ethanol into acetaldehyde that is the worst, but the human body is remarkably resilient to it.
Humans have a very interesting relationship to alcohol, for sure. It was very useful for preserving primitive beer for long periods which helped us survive and evolve. Hell, it is even theorized that we started to develop the ability to process the stuff so we wouldn’t get blasted out of our minds when we left the trees to forage for fruits that may have already been fermented.
But, yes, it could be considered a toxin that has no purpose these days. Truth be told, it is still useful for it’s medicinal effects when combined with other medications for cold and flu relief. In highly stressful situations it can be beneficial for a quick morale boost. There are plenty of other uses for it as well.
In full disclosure, I don’t drink anymore. My body has always metabolized it too well and led me to drink a lot, quickly. Hangovers were always short if I even had a serious one at all. This excessive drinking led to an addiction which took me years to overcome. But enough about me…
My point is not to underestimate its benefits, s’all. Moderation is key and for those who cannot moderate, abstain.
Wow, very interesting and informative!
Also want to say congrats on the sobriety. I know all to well of what that kind of withdrawal is like (2 years bzd clean as of yesterday!)
It was very useful for preserving primitive beer
The alcohol content in primitive beer was far too low to act as a preservative. The only reason it was useful back then is because it didn’t cause dysentery - which was purely because it was boiled and had nothing to do with the alcohol
medicinal effects when combined with other medications for cold and flu relief.
Alcohol is an immunosuppressant
Good correction, thanks. I must have been thinking of hops that was added later to preserve the beer. Boiling is a much simpler answer.
Alcohol is an immunosuppressant, yes. To clarify my point, It’s proper function is as a solvent in, say, cough syrup, to ensure correct mixture. It can change the rate at which medicines are broken down by the body to some degree while also acting as an extremely mild sedative as well.
