This piece from Time shows that teetotalers have higher mortality rates than those who only practice temperance moderately. This is even after all variables such as economic background, race, and gender were taken into consideration. Not only that, but those who have never been drunk are more likely to die than heavy drinkers, despite all of the disease risk associated with large amounts of boozing. Part of this may be that non-drinkers have higher rates of depression than those who like to party.
Perhaps the Puritans had this one wrong. Or maybe the socialist ideologues at Time are trying to excuse reckless behavior and further paralyze functional, moral America.
Uhh, no. This study fails to give any reasonable cause for this odd phenomenon. Let’s wait for people to stop getting liver cancer from drinking before we put stock in this survey, or revise morality.
Brendan,
See revision.
this is great news for me
I am always deeply suspicious of studies such as this – its very difficult to eliminate all the variables in a system and more importantly, most people (sorry to say but sometimes even scientists) seem to always think correlation implies causality. Just because two observations seem to be correlated, in no way does it mean there is a cause-effect relationship between them (sometimes there is causality, but in systems this is often very difficult to prove explicitly). Randomness and/or other unknown complexities are usually not considered.
Here’s a good test: when studies come out like this make note of them and watch for a contradicting study to appear. It inevitably will. Caffeine is bad for you, then caffeine is good for you, etc. Scientists aren’t the only ones that fall victim to this trap of inferring causality between events which seem to be correlated; the media makes the same mistake all the time. If you watch the news or read the newspapers regularly you probably have noticed this (CNBC comes to mind…markets are up because of jobs report, then later in the day markets are down because of the very same jobs report..)