Surely you have seen headlines like "Scientists have shown that a glass of wine a day prolongs life" more than once in the media. It is not worth believing for several reasons.
First, scientists don't "prove" anything. They test hypotheses under certain conditions and draw correct conclusions with a certain probability.
For example, a specific study could test how alcohol correlates with the deaths of white European men. While a glass of wine a day has been found to be associated with increased life expectancy as a result, it is not a fact that this relationship is causal.
Perhaps a third factor is "to blame" for everything - for example, the level of income: rich European men can afford a glass of wine a day, as well as quality food and good medicines. Or cause and effect are confused: it is not alcohol that improves health, but those who are relatively healthy can drink a little. Finally, in such a study, nothing is known about women, people of other races and nationalities, and there are still many unexplained factors. Therefore, it is not possible to extend the results of a study to all people.
The second point is that even if you look at all the studies, it turns out that there is no connection between small doses of alcohol and better health. There is such a scientific method as meta-analysis: scientists collect all the appropriate research on a specific topic, summarize it and draw conclusions. In the meta-analysis, the errors of individual scientific works are smoothed out, their conclusions are more or less applicable to the life of each of us. Thus, according to the meta-analyzes, there is no difference in the health of people who drink little and those who don't drink at all.
So alcohol in small doses - no more than 10 grams of ethanol per day (about a glass of wine, beer or a glass of vodka) is unlikely to improve your well-being in any way, but it won't get much worse either.
Wait, but alcohol and a healthy lifestyle are incompatible!
I'll tell you more: modern life is generally not very compatible with a healthy lifestyle. If you live in a city and drive a car, you no longer lead a healthy lifestyle.
In a car, for example, there are so many carcinogens in the air - vodka never dreamed of! Running down a busy highway is more killer than those 20 grams of pure alcohol. And if you smoke too, it doesn't matter what you drink.
This does not mean that you can drink as much as you want, as all is lost anyway.
The alcoholism of "beer" is worse than "vodka" There is no "beer", "vodka", "pynonoir" and other types of alcoholism. There is only one type: addiction to ethanol.
For this addiction, it does not matter at all in what form the alcohol will enter the body. Another thing is that over time the alcoholic's ethanol requirement increases. It gets to the point that a person is no longer able to drink that much beer or wine to reach "condition" - because the stomach size is limited. Therefore, most alcoholics eventually switch to vodka - it's ideal for them in terms of price / quality / effect.
Let's just say the switch to vodka is an indicator that the addiction has gone far enough. Few people start with alcohol right away: "light alcohol" such as beer and wine is usually used in the beginning. But just as there are no "soft drugs", there is also no "soft alcohol" - any drink can be addictive - and that's not far from vodka there.
If you drink, don't mix the drinks!
Again, the body doesn't care which drink it got the ethanol from. The severity of the intoxication (and the resulting hangover) depends only on the amount of pure alcohol you drink. Stir, don't mix - if you overdo it, it'll go bad in the morning anyway.
There are obviously nuances: some drinks contain "aggravating" substances, the same methanol. Very often found in products, especially homemade, the raw material for which served from berries, rich in pectin - pears, apples, cherries, to a lesser extent - grapes. Now, if you mix vodka and calvados, you will feel the effects of both ethanol and methanol in the morning. Much the same after cognac with beer: the hangover will simply be more "colorful", with toxic "notes" typical of both drinks. So, if there is a possibility, it is best not to mix. In the case of.
In the cold, you can warm yourself by drinking 100 grams
You can not. On the contrary, you can freeze even more, until you die.
Alcohol causes the vessels in the skin to expand through which heat is released. If you walked into the room from the cold and drank a little, it can help you warm up faster - the blood vessels expand, but the heat will stay with you, because it's also hot around you. But if you drink alcohol on the street, the heat through the dilated vessels will quickly leave your body and you will freeze even more.
Due to this "special effect" of alcohol, drunk people freeze on the street even at + 20 ° C: the air and ground temperature is lower than the body temperature, the body very quickly gives off too much heat and cools down- till death.
Alcohol is a good sleeping pill
Alcohol actually deadens brain activity, which can make you feel drowsy and fall asleep quickly. But most likely such a dream will be short and unproductive.
The effect of alcohol is similar to that of some sleeping pills. You fall asleep quickly, but the sleep phases are interrupted and you can wake up in the middle of the night and not fall asleep again until the morning.
"Alcoholic" sleep is not physiological, incomplete, it does not bring normal rest. Therefore it is not recommended to use alcoholic beverages as sleeping pills, and it is generally advisable not to drink immediately before bedtime.