[...] almost 70 per cent of males and 60 per cent of females do not know what volume of alcohol puts them at risk of brain damage.
Leading Melbourne neuropsychologists Martin Jackson says the latest research shows women are at high risk if they consume at least three standard drinks a day for eight to 10 years.
Dr Jackson says men who quaff at least six standard drinks a day for eight to 10 years face the same risk of brain damage.
I’m not interested in hearing who’s over and under, but I am curious about who already knew that the amount of alcohol intake that would ultimately lead to measurable brain damage was as low as it is. I certainly knew that the guidelines for women are no more than 2 units of alcohol per day and overall fewer than 12 units per week, but I viewed that as a general health guideline rather than a specific avoidance-of-brain-damage guideline.
The brain damage manifests insidiously, and largely is demonstrated by increasing forgetfulness and inability to learn new skills, both of which are highly associated with eventual job loss.
So when you drink lots over a long period of time, the effects include forgetting stuff and not being able to learn new skills, and eventually losing your job to someone younger?
That’s called ageing.
In the ABC link, the example they’re showing of mild brain damage is a man who drank “10 to 15 beers a day” when he was underage and “20 or 30 beers” a day as an adult: if they were 375ml cans/bottles or schooners with the usual 1.5 standard, that’d work out to 15 to 23.5 standard drinks a day young, and 25 to 45 as a grown-up. I mean, obviously that’s no example worth following, but it’s no reason to get alarmist or demand $20 million in Temperance education funding.
Plus, he was a lawyer. There’s latent brain damage right there.
I don’t think that for men that is that low a limit. Anyone who consistently drank 4 or 5 stubbies a night would have me looking askance at them, I would expect a permanent effect.
Damn. 15 schooners of full-strength beer contain 22.5 standard drinks, not 23.5, and 20 schooners contain 30 drinks, not 25.
For my acquired innumeracy I blame atmospheric particle pollution. And high-energy power cables. And mobile phone towers. And lead paint. And masturbation. And jet engine noise from the flight path. And organophosphate residues in the water supply. And heavy metal contamination of seafood.
It’s not that much, wilful. According to the Commonwealth’s example:
I find it amazing, personally, the way perceptions of drinking change when you substitute substances, VB longnecks for glasses-or-two of pinot gris, bundy ‘n’ cokes for malts, and so on. Those disgraceful stubby drinkers!
I’m sorry…what were you saying?
I am curious about who already knew that the amount of alcohol intake that would ultimately lead to measurable brain damage was as low as it is.
Your use of the word “low” is thought provoking. I know people who would have at least one drink a day every day and have been for decades – eg a whisky at night. I do know someone for who I think this has exacerbated the usual mental decline of old age.
The media is going all out on the shock horror of all this. But it might help to take a deep breathe and think a bit.
All alcohol intake kills brain cells.
This study (I can’t find any exact name of a peer reviewed published paper, only headlines. I’m not suggesting there isn’t a paper, but I like to see the exact findings) seems to be talking about measurable damage. It then suggests that “possibly” if you drink the equivelant of a whole bottle of wine each night for 7 days a week over 10 years that it will effect your brain function to some extent. To what extent it doesn’t say but it seems to be mainly about reduced IQ score.
Even the news release reports suggest that:
So after taking a deep breathe we see that perhaps drinking a whole bottle of plonk MOST nights by yourself, all year, and not drinking say on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Sundays you arrest the “possible” damage.
In line with what we already know I’d say.
i think the bigger problem is the effect binge drinking has on a brain of someone under 25 years of age (ie, when the brain is still “plastic”) – althought i have no doubt that, irrespective of your age, hitting the booze day in day out for a couple of decades would not do too much for your intelligence, let alone your general physical appearance. still it’s a free world, isn’t it? hahahaha!!!!!
in any event, i’ve met some really dim-witted teetotallers in my time too – so what’s their excuse??
Alcohol doesn’t kill brain cells, so the damage must be sustained by some other mechanism.
I believe, as does all of my family, that drinking a bottle or more of big bold shiraz every night for the past decade or more, has kept my father alive.
why on earth do we have to go on learning new skills ad infinitum? I’ve got more than enough skills that will take many lifetimes to really mistress without wanting to take on any new ones, thank you very much.
Yeah, I used to know these figures about 10 years ago. But for some insidious reason I’ve been getting forgetful lately.
Six beers a day is an awful lot. And doing it over eight years? I think that barrier is high not low.
“two or three alcohol-free days a week is enough to significantly reduce the likelihood of sustaining a disability”
Yeah, I find two or three alcohol free days a week easy. It’s the alcohol free nights that present the difficulty…
Unless you’re drinking something very cheap, it’s hard to sustain even a six-pack a night for 8 years. That’s close to two cases of beer a week (i.e. $240 a month), enough to service a $10,000 personal loan. The obvious answer is to cultivate better taste, restricting yourself to decent alcohol rather than rubbish, which then has an inhibiting effect on your consumption. Either that or have kids (although that didn’t seem to put the brakes on that lawyer guy in the article).
On the more basic question: is six (M) or three (F) standard drinks in a day a lot? I don’t think it’s a question that can be resolved with a simple yes or no, not without looking at the rest of the circumstances around consumption. Let’s have a few thoroughly fictional case studies.
A is a twenty-year old male office worker living in a major metropolitan centre. Every lunchtime, he goes to the pub downstairs with his coworkers and boss and everybody has six middies of full-strength beer. On the way back to the office, he grabs some souvlaki.
B is a prop-forward in a third-grade rugby union side. He’s 240cm tall, weighs 160kg, swims every day, does a weights session three times weekly and jogs regularly. With his vast dinner of carbohydrates and protein he likes to have a light beer and three small glasses of wine.
C is 17 and his strict, religious, teetotal parents do not let him stay at parties after 10.30pm. At a friend’s birthday he gulps 120ml of rum from a bottle passed around, and feels ill.
D is watching a one-day international cricket match. He drinks a can of the sponsor’s beer with the opening of batting, one with tea, one at lunch and one just before stumps. Murali’s a fucken’ cheat.
E is 80 years old and a Russian immigrant. He likes to play chess against the other men in his retirement home, eat pickled vegetables, drink filthy strong tea and share the vodka his grandchildren bring him. Over an afternoon’s play he’ll have about eight hot cups of tea and four nips of vodka. The doctors worry about his bladder.
F is Paul Pennyfeather in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. He has half a pint of beer for luncheon, and a pint with dinner, a meal he has invariably in Hall. He’s reading for the Church.
G and H are food critics for an uppity bourgeois magazine. Six nights a week they eat together on the company bill at restaurants, where they share a 750ml bottle of wine. She has the recommended two glasses while he drinks the recommended four. She’s not nearly so happy with the arrangement as he is.
All of the examples I’ve made up are examples of “healthy” behaviour, and in all cases an identical amount of ethyl alcohol has been consumed. “A new survey”: bah.
DD.
First off I’d fire A. Now.
B – weird
C – any 17 year old who lets her parents bully her to not be out after 10.30pm or anything like that has problems.
D – needs to eat more
E – Healthy Lifestyle
F – That English food will kill him
G & H – Some job huh?
While corporate Australia profits from alcohol related misery…
A more frightening and insidious social development is people who do not drink at all or who stop after one or two. What a nation of pansy tee-totallers we are becoming. I blame American sitcoms. Nobody ever drinks in those, AND they drink water out of wine glasses.
I drank a lot of booze when I first moved back to Darwin from Sydney, usually in the form of binging on weekends. A bottle of spirits to myself plus whatever was going about. Essentially I think I was self medicating my depression.
Two things have changed since then.
The first is that my liver is pretty shot. If I binge extra-heavily it swells and breathing becomes difficult due to pain. Blood tests show that it’s A Bad Idea for me to binge any more.
The second is that I take zoloft. This means that I don’t get the the urge to drink any more and when I do, it’s much more potent. I can drink a beer and feel pretty sloshed, but usually I just want to go to sleep.
So in fact I don’t really drink any more, except as a social thing. Even then I tend to hang back. I’ve probably already done a generous fraction of my lifetime’s drinking already.
I just drink to forget that I’m losing my memory.
I just drink to forget that I’m losing my memory .
I just drink to forget that I’m losing my memory.
I think I know how you feel Vladimir.
If some guy in this “ABC Link” really drinks 20-30 beers a day, he deserves a medal. Perhaps the Victoria Bitter Cross.
Oz goverment recommendations for healthy limits to alcohol consumption, from the site DD referred to: http://www.alcohol.gov.au/internet/alcohol/publishing.nsf/Content/summary
So, the existing science and guidelines already agree with this study, and there is no need to PANIC.
Or you could just make your own. Ain’t that difficult, and it is damn cheap. Used to brew a light, low alcohol (3%), and very nice ginger beer that kept the whistle wet, and the alcohol consumption down.
Also, a lot of the damage done by ‘alcohol’, is not done by the ethanol (which is the bit that makes you pissed). It is done by the various congeners that are made along with the ethanol in fermenting process. These include, acetone, acetyl, methanol, ethyl acetate, and amyl alcohol, plus literally dozens of others. This is the stuff that is really poisonous and also gives you the hangover. Try drinking equivalent amounts of alcohol as beer, and then a few days later as vodka. The vodka will be much easier to recover from.
Right… Because no-one ever thought to mix spirits with soft drink before.
Depends on the vodka Hilker.
I’ve made spirits from my own fermentation of carbohydrates and a home-made still, and it was a LOT cleaner than some bottom-shelf spirits I could mention. This was with a pot still, not even a proper reflux one.
A mate brought a white rum back from Fiji which smelt and tasted strongly of isopropanol. Tape head cleaner – nice.
A question:
Does drinking lots make you care less about the long term effects of drinking lots?
Hilker – do you have a good recipe for low alcohol ginger beer? I’d like to have a go.
FXH – there are kits you could use for a starting point, but it’s really just as simple as fermenting sugar with some brewer’s yeast (and nutrients*) with grated ginger in it. About a tablespoon of ginger per litre, and sugar depending on the desired potency. The kits will give you a table for sugar-in to alcohol-out.
*These are some trace elements to speed up fermentation to full dryness. Homebrew shops or mail order.
I’m sure everyone knows how to run a hosepipe into a car to off themselves – it’s quite another thing to market the Honda Topper with easy to fit exhaust plug, handy window hatch, the fresh smell of menthol and some of the hottest party tunes available.
I don’t automatically dismiss this, though I do wonder a couple of things:
- Why use a case study of a bloke who drinks 20-30 beers a day to illustrate the idea that three drinks a day will melt your brain?
- Is this “research” coming from the same organisations who bluster that the tiniest amount of alcohol in pregnancy or breastfeeding will give your child malformations, a 20-IQ-point drop, elephantiasis, ADD, heartworm, and hives?
Because naturally, lauredhel, just as rhetorical questions lead inexorably to sarcastic answers, that one more glass of red with dinner is a first Zen step on the road to rocking up at the bank teller with your jolly old sawn-off .410. Or to a law degree, I suppose.
John Greenfield, I assume you know your Belloc?
And would someone please cite Bill for the Distinguished Responsible Service Order (With Saloon Bar), for coming up with the VBC.
I just drink to forget that I’m losing my memory.
Excellent to find Belloc had addressed this issue already.
As for the skewing of population health research, it’s similar to the obesity stuff. Do the studies support the public health policy? If we over-zealously demand abstinence with regard to alcohol, for the purposes of getting the health message across in dumbed-down terms, we probably have done no real harm (except to the breweries and wineries and distilleries).
But if you tell otherwise healthy people to lose weight because their body-mass-index makes them technically overweight or borderline obese, you’re probably doing actual harm. Weight loss ( as opposed to alcohol abstinence) in otherwise healthy people is dangerous. And to foster dissatisfaction with body shape (which is what reliance on an arbitrary measure of BMI does) amongst adolescents (or younger) is to foster a much more deadlier disease: anorexia.
Memory loss is a Very Good Thing. In fact, intoxicants are a necessary evolutionary invention and advantage. Without them we would go crazy.
Infuriating though, that they don’t kill dreams, but just make them more vivid and insistent.
Here’s a good Ginger Beer Kit in Melbourne
FDB: Yes it depends a lot on the brand of vodka, but almost any commercial vodka is better than any commercial beer, wine, or flavoured spirits (whisky, rum, etc). Basically just go for the vodka with the least taste and smell. I quite like (plain) Finlandia.
I also did a little stillin a few years back with a full fractionating still, about 1.5m tall, (not as hard to build and run as some might think), and it produced some ultra clean ethanol. Mmmm. Very cheap too, not including the cost of the still it used about $2 worth of consumable inputs per litre of vodka.
Stillin is a great hobby that should be legal. All that hysteria about it being dangerous is utter BS. The average amateur can easily make a cleaner and better tasting product than the commercial operators.
I guess the isopropanol rum has its uses. Serve it up when you have unwanted guests. (Actually, don’t, that was just a joke. Isopropanol is poisonous, as well as foul tasting.)
Does drinking lots make you care less about the long term effects of drinking lots?
Umm…, well…, umm…
What was the question?
FXH: FDB’s recipe is a good place to start. The kits you linked to are the sort of thing I was using most of the time. Just try a few and you’ll find a nice one. Don’t know how much you know about fermenting, but if you want some basic tips, just ask.
Ok, Now what explains the teetotal component ( Australians approve government’s handling of Haneef-Oz, 6/8)?
I just drink to forget that I’m losing my memory .
Hilker:
Is it actually illegal? You can buy pretty good stills from homebrewing stores in Melbourne [at least, they work well - unfortunately they're made of pretty low-grade steel and I wouldn't trust them in the long run]. My impression was that as long as you’re not selling it you can knock yourself out, as it were. And yes you’re right, all the bullshit hype about going blind is just meant to scare chumps out of trying – if you get a nice clean fermentation there’s nothing to worry about.
My best EVAH!!!1!!1 batch from the old pot still was fermented from mashed potato with sliced Valencia oranges – all ingredients homegrown besides the yeast. The volatile oils from the orange peel wound up coming through with the ethanol (as I’d hoped but couldn’t be stuffed researching). It made a crystal clear spirit, almost pure ethanol with a powerful orange flavour, that went milky over ice. An unmitigated triumph if I may say so.
One of the best lazy-person’s uses for a proper fractioning still is just to eke out the good stuff from a whole bunch of Chateau Cardboard. If you play your cards right with the column temp you can let all the hangover poisons go, and get around 350-400mL of ethanol from a single $8 box of lambrusco.
Me and a mate have a long-running backburner project to make a Top Aussie Gin infused with native botanicals. Look for it on all good top shelves some time in 2020.
Problem is there’s not many easy ways of telling whether you’ve had a nice clean fermentation, FDB, if you’re an ordinary punter who can’t tell CH3OH from CH3CH2OH using a box of half-inch nails and a shifting spanner.
Ever thought of doing a grappa? That’s an Italian immigrant thing from way back. Mmmm, in fact, I think I can feel one coming on right now.
To all intents and purposes grappa’s what I’m doing with the pallet-o’-goon distillation I suppose.
That’s what got me started actually. A Chilean ex-girlfriend called me up years back to say some old relative had dropped off the twig, and she had about twenty 2L flagons of grappa to get rid of. Naturally I stepped up to the plate, always eager to help dear friends deal with their grief.
I was living with a speed and weed dealer at the time, and we went into business together for a few heady weeks selling “party packs” – a point of meth, a gram of green and a 250mL bottle of about 100 proof spirit. Messy times…
Mate, you should be in Marketing, though I’ll take your word for the messyness. Smoko after drinking always is.
How much were you asking, and did you go in for fancy packaging?
“How much were you asking, and did you go in for fancy packaging?”
Uncanny! My nickname is Fancy, as a matter of fact, and yes, it was a very nicely presented package deal. Label on the grappa said “Fancy’s Fine Old Sippin’ Crunk”, with the illegals in a ziplock bag tied to the neck of the bottle with a purple ribbon. No holds barred in the all-night craft sessions of my (comparative) youth. $100 the lot, mostly because the crystal was so clean.
I’m surprised I remember any of this, I must say.
The ribbon’s a nice touch.
There’s nobody in the world funnier than a drug dealer with a mission. My favourite was one character who got about in a panel van professionally done up with all the tradesmen’s accoutrements, and decals on the side that said “Skunk Cleaning” with a phone number and a picture of Pepe Le Pew. (I think he’s in jail now).
God knows what he would have done if he’d actually been run up to do any cleaning.
FDB
Unless you have specific permits for fuel or commercial booze production, then it is illegal in Oz to even own a still with a boiler capacity over 5 litres, regardless of what you do or don’t still in it. However you can buy complete distillation units just about anywhere in Oz, including boilers of 25 litres or bigger, and explicit instructions on how to use it to make booze, so obviously the law is turning a blind eye. (‘Blind’. Get it?) The hypocrisy of it is staggering, considering the extreme demonisation of green.
Citrus zest/oil is a pretty good flavouring. We used to buy the little bottles of flavour concentrate from Coles/Woolies. The best ones were lemon, lime, bitters, and peppermint, and they work in various combinations (go easy on the peppermint, it is strong). But you need to also add a bit of sweetness, we used glucose, not sucrose (normal table sugar).
Our first couple of runs through the still were with any swill we could get our poor student hands on. Which meant all the cheap undrinkable rotgut that friends had sitting in the back of their booze cupboards, including cask wine, cooking sherry, crap beer, nasty liqueurs, you name it, the whole lot was just mixed together and run. We had to run it twice to clean it up properly but the product was crystal clear and very nice to drink, and hangover-free (people don’t believe that, but it is true).
I look forward to your Top Aussie Gin, â??Fancyâ??s Fine Old Sippinâ?? Crunkâ??. LOL. Should sell with a name like that.
Sounds like you had some pretty wild days in your youth. Me too. Didn’t get into the powders myself, but plenty around me did, I went for green and a bit of acid (‘Clearlights’), and lots of music.
It is pretty easy to tell if you have a clean ferment, just smell and taste it. Trust me, only people without any sense of smell or taste at all couldn’t tell methanol from ethanol.
Besides which, methanol is only produced in very small quantities in most ferments. There is more methanol in a couple litres of orange juice than in a 25 litre plain sugar ferment (another reason why stillin is actually quite safe).
Word.
alcohol & green, there is a cautionary rhyme that all 14yr old learn, if too late.
Grass & drink you’re in the pink,
drink & grass you’re on your ass.
Any (private) distillation of alcohol without an (unobtainable) permit is illegal.
Customs used to have a squad, technically the Diesel & Excise department,chasing people using tax free diesel on-road but, after pressure on Frazer from the Nats, devoted soley to harassing old italian & yugoslavians following their proudly honed family traditions of making grappa, slivovich and schnapps. In the ‘old country’ the raw materials were, by definition, scraps coz food was the first priority.
Oddly, prosecutions were rare and NEVER for the amounts confiscated which might have had something to do with the squad being useless elsewhere in Customs coz they were drunks.
“Grass & drink you’re in the pink,
drink & grass you’re on your ass.”
Yeah, but if you’re hepped up on goofballs nothing can take you down. I wish I could make that rhyme…
Hilker:
Yea verily, acid was my drug of choice for many a year. Mostly because it suited my addictive personality, in that (as much fun as it is) I never really wanted to take more than once a fortnight or so. It’s a roughly annual thing now.
fdb – you with the program and taking online orders these days? None of that 70′s raffia tied to bottle these days I hope.
I got a shock the other week. I went around to one of my aunties the other day. She’s 75 or so. I hadn’t been to her place for years. So she took me out to the laundry to see her still and insisted I try a few snorts. At 10 am. On a weekday. On my way to another work gig. Brightened up a rainy melbourne day it did.
She said she got the still from New Zealand where its all legit. She gave me the website somewhere and said she’d coach me on the skill. It got a bit complicated lately trying to recycle water etc but she’s got that sorted with hoses and tanks out the window etc.
Halfway down this page there is a bit on the Oz legal situation. Legal ok in NZ. Not in USA.
Pure Distilling – Australia Largest Manufacturer of Quality Stills – presumably someone makes non quality ones.
FXH – I was but a wee bairn in the 70s, so raffia’s never really been in my craft box. The still is all stalled at the moment – I looked into a NZ-made jobby last year, but it wasn’t big enough (probably to conform to the rules as laid out by Hilker above) and was powdercoated cheap & nasty steel. Next time I’m doing it right, so it’ll be out with the welder and make one from scratch. Electric element installed in a beer keg is the latest theory, or two steel milking buckets welded rim-to-rim.
Water recycling’s a toughie, because it comes out of the cooling jacket bloody hot. A friend over in Perth used to run it into the bath and sit there soaking while he fine-tuned the flow rate and ‘supervised’ the process – I imagine a fair bit of quality testing was involved!