My hunch? Alcohol is under attack from the left hemisphere, which sees parts (studies, surveys, stats) but is blind to the whole. A culture without drink is a culture without celebration. A culture without celebration is dead, and there's nothing more unhealthy than that. The problem with celebration is, it can't be measured so the left hemisphere dismisses it as irrelevant.
A healthy left hemisphere (one subordinate to the right hemisphere) would dismiss celebration as beyond its specialty, but it wouldn't deem it "irrelevant." It'd deem it mysterious, perhaps, but such a label at least affords it respect.
It seems obvious to me that our right hemispheres need to process these health warnings that the left hemisphere is bringing. That, after all, is what the left hemisphere does. Just because it tends to go rogue, doesn't mean we should dismiss it altogether.
So what do we do with these new studies?
I'd say, take them seriously but with a dose of skepticism about science (a skepticism virtually unheard of 20 years ago, but that is far more widespread in the wake of Covid (one of Covid's blessings).
Here, I'd take the money shot from the article serious:
How much time does a certain amount of drinking shave off your life? For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average, he said. Consume seven alcoholic beverages a week, and that amount goes up to about two and a half months. Those who push five drinks a day or more face the risk of losing, on average, upward of two years, said Stockwell. He emphasized that all those numbers were averages — and that it was impossible to predict the level of impact an individual person would experience.
Based on that, try to keep your beverage consumption under seven. The researcher who is spearheading the research (from Canada, btw, which is vying with Australia for the most paternalistic governments in the world), says three to six drinks every week is low risk.
That strikes me as a good touchstone, at least if you're over, say, 45 and concerned about what alcohol does to your brain (Huberman says more than two a week can hurt you cognitively in the long run) in the long run.
If you limit yourself to three drinks per session, twice a week, you're respecting the left hemisphere's efforts while putting it in a greater context that there's more to life than adhering to the science of health. It's a tough balance but that's why we have two hemispheres.
