--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained, so let me tell you about today. It's February 1st, which means dry January is over. If you don't know about dry January, the deal is you start the year by abstaining from alcohol. People drink a lot during the holidays, so why not try and drink nothing at all in January? But this dry January felt a little more lit than those that preceded it.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just anecdotally, I heard about people taking part way more than usual. And on top of that, a lot of people were talking about the latest study on how much alcohol you should be drinking because based on the latest study, if you really want to play it safe, you shouldn't drink any.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That study came out of Canada where previous guidance said you could drink about two drinks a day and be safe. This new guidance says if you have to drink, try and keep it at two drinks a week. These recommendations come as young people across western nations are already drinking less.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So on the show today, we're going to humor dry February. We're going to hear the case for not drinking at all.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A powerful data structure adapts to your business model, sinks in all your contacts in minutes, and enriches your business with actionable data. Adio says it also allows you to create those email sequences, those real-time reports, those powerful automations, which they claim can help you build what matters most, your company.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Having a night out with your friends is awesome. Dealing with hangovers sucks. Meet Senorita, the THC-infused margarita that lets you skip the booze, but keep the vibe.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Made with real fruit, organic agave, and Himalayan pink salt, every sip is like a mini getaway. No fillers, no hangovers, just full flavor and a better buzz. Find your flavor at senoritadrinks.com. Use code VOX20 for 20% off. Must be 21 and over.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This product may cause intoxication. This product has not been evaluated or approved by the FDA. This product may contain up to 0.3% THC.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today is gonna be explained. Sean Ramos from here with Dr. Tim Naimi, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: It's one of the groups behind the latest study on how alcohol affects our health, and we wanted to go straight to the source.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Alcohol is related to a number of different costs of death. You know, it's a small molecule. It can affect DNA. So alcohol, especially drinking over small amounts, is related to all the major forms of heart disease, like, you know, heart attacks, heart failure, irregular heartbeats, and high blood pressure.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: It's also related to, causally related to at least seven types of cancer, including colon cancer and breast cancer, and also a variety of stomach and intestinal problems and liver problems.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: And we can also talk about the risk of injuries or accidents, which start to increase. That's more based on your, you know, how much you drink on any one occasion as opposed to your average consumption.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: And if you're like, cancer, really? I gave up smoking on account of cancer. Just to give your listeners more of a sense of it, there are studies that have compared, for example, alcohol to cigarettes as a cancer cause.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: And it's estimated that one drink of alcohol is approximately the same cancer-causing potential as one to two cigarettes, depending on if you're a man or a woman.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Another way to think about it is that for breast cancer, which is a pretty common cancer among women, for each additional drink that a woman consumes per day on average, that that results in about somewhere between an 8% and a 10% increase of the risk of cancer over her baseline risk of cancer, right?
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: So not everyone's, you know, but if we say that, you know, depending on what number you look at, like 1 in 12 women will develop, or 1 in 11, 1 in 10, depending on what age you use, will develop breast cancer.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: An additional drink per day is about a 10% increase in risk. So it's an absolute 1% increase in the risk of developing breast cancer.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: These are complicated messages to get across, but that's just to give you kind of a sense.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: All this might feel like a buzzkill compared to all those previous studies that said, go ahead and have a glass or two of wine a day.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: But Dr. Namy says that isn't actually what those studies said. Actually, the results of this study are actually very similar, which is even the previous studies that were thinking, oh, maybe a little bit of wine is maybe good for us.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: What was very clear is that even in those studies, above even a half a drink a day on average, the risk started to climb up.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: But I think even there, the risks were underestimated. But if you view it in that light, what we're seeing in our study, which is based on thousands of studies over the past 20 years, it's kind of a consistent message that above very low levels of alcohol, the risk of an alcohol-caused death starts to increase.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Before, it was like up to six or seven drinks a week. And now we're saying it's probably more like that risk starts to climb up, you know, starting at three drinks a week and higher.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: But what my mom would say back to you is that the queen had a gin every day, if not multiples, and she lived to be like 98 or whatever.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, no, no. Well, I think that's great. Like, so all of these risks on our massive averages, right? We are developing sort of national guidelines.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For example, is the queen living longer because she has a glass of gin every night? Or is the queen living longer because she has the best doctors and she, you know, enjoys walks and has a healthy lifestyle and has no stress?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not saying, you know, I don't know. I've never been a queen myself, right? But I'm just, if the queen lives to be 99, do we think it's because she drinks a glass of gin or you think it's because she's the queen?
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: I bet it's because she's the queen myself. But even if she weren't the queen, or even if the queen wasn't in a very socially advantaged position, and we know that actually social advantage is probably the most important determinant of life expectancy and quality of life even if that weren't the case.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: I think we all know you know the aunt or the uncle who drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney and lived to be 100. And we also know you know, unfortunately, other people who, like, were super healthy, did everything right, and, you know, passed away of some god-awful disease, you know, in their 40s, right?
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: So, I think, again, these are a giant averaging effect. And, you know, long live the queen and her gin. But again, I think making light of the situation, but I think that that's sort of the issue.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: We can all think of exceptions or drinking is sort of an upper, it's considered a luxury item because if you look throughout society, actually, people in middle and higher incomes are more likely to drink alcohol than people in low incomes.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does this study that you and your outfit published? My outfit. I like it.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Does it purport to be the final word? Because I think part of the frustration here is people can't keep track of whether it's good or bad or what's okay, one drink, two drink, three drink, and now maybe zero drinks.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Again, not don't ever drink, but the least amount of risk is associated with zero drinks. You know, I feel like people just roll their eyes, but here we have one that feels to be, I don't know, different at least.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Yeah. Well, let me ask you, because here at my outfit at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. Again, we were just one of 16 outfits across Canada that worked on this.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: As a scientist, I would say to you, absolutely, science is never definitive. Anyone who tells you that any study is definitive is probably not a great scientist, in my opinion.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: But what I would say to this is that this represents the best current science. We're using, I think, the best methods that is the way that the World Health Organization calculates alcohol attributable deaths.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: And again, the main message that's coming out of these guidelines is actually consistent with all the other research, which if you boil it down, at the end of the day, if you drink alcohol and you want to help your health, drinking less is better than drinking more.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How low you need to go, there's some play in that, but I can absolutely tell you that what is the most consistent finding in the literature that's been there for decades is that, you know, when it comes to longevity, less alcohol is the way to go.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We did a show a while back on the social benefits of drinking. It was called The Case for Drinking. Human civilization requires people to cooperate.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's a line of thinking that, you know, alcohol may have helped us to do that. It sort of socially disinhibits us just enough to sort of cooperate.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a way, it may be similar to what religion did for early humans. I mean, essentially, just as early religions gave people something to rally around, alcohol may have played a pretty similar function.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Did your study take into account any of those factors, or is that sort of a different question for you guys?
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: First of all, and we acknowledge this in the report, there are many reasons why people choose to drink or not to drink.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Our report is primarily focused on health. You know, for some people, drinking alcohol has some of those kind of social benefits.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Again, typically at really relatively low levels. We also have to remember that also alcohol is leading preventable cause of intellectual disability in children.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Alcohol causes blackout. People often don't remember what they did in a state of intoxication. The dangers of that are enormous.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: We see domestic violence, abuse, rape, neglect occur in the context of alcohol. So, like, if we want to get into the social aspects, good and bad, of alcohol, we should consider the full spectrum of them.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: And again, I think in terms of the social benefits, those are happening more at the lower aspects of consumption.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: We didn't try to quantify those benefits. But again, I think when you increase consumption, the number of harmful social consequences increases and the beneficial ones start to decrease.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can I ask you about loneliness before we go?
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Sure.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because there's like a loneliness pandemic. You've surely heard of it.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Loneliness is deadly in its own way. It seems to be spiking across the Western world.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I wonder if there's like a competing phenomena here that, you know, people are maybe drinking less and thus they're more lonely because they're socializing less and they're not leaving the house.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Do you think there is any relation between alcohol consumption and loneliness?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: Well, that's an interesting way of thinking about it. I guess I'll just sort of go off the top of my head.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: I think it depends on what kind of activities you do. So for people whose social networks and a lot of their activities are very alcohol-centric, well then, if they stop drinking, they may lose some of those friends or some of those activities may be more difficult.
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--:-- Dr. Tim Naimi: But I think one of the ideas behind Dry January is to see how we feel not doing that and actually to like maybe reach out to other people or to try other activities that are less dependent on alcohol because lo and behold, they might be pretty good and they might help with loneliness.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not anymore, says Built Rewards. Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community. And Built wants you to go out and do things in the community.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members. Every month.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you're ready to travel, they say Bilt points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining Bilt.com slash Explained.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to The Chronicle, there has been a big growth in non-alcoholic beers, wines, and spirits during the pandemic.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The demand has become so high that sober bars and shops are opening up. Restaurants have also added non-alcoholic drinks to their menu, saying it's the same as offering gluten-free options to accommodate everyone's taste.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is back.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Abstaining from alcohol seems to be having a moment, which is great news for Ross Henfler.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: Yeah, that's right. Like a lot of young kids, I grew up just thinking that drinking was one of the things you did on the way to adulthood.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And especially as a young man, I felt a lot of pressure to drink and drink heavily at a fairly young age.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And I never liked the taste. I didn't appreciate the peer pressure that came along with it, the sense of having to prove my masculinity by drinking a lot.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And fortunately, I was lucky enough, this is in the late 1980s, to encounter the punk rock scene.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And I met some people that were Straight Edge. So-called Straight Edgers don't even drink. They don't smoke. And they don't do drugs.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: Who had made a commitment not to use alcohol, drugs, and tobacco and made it cool not to use.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: All Straight Edge is. It's a way to live your life better. It's a way to live your life positive. And it's a brotherhood.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And I fell in love with not just the hardcore music, but with that lifestyle as well.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: Straight edge emerged in the punk rock and hardcore scenes of Washington DC in the early 1980s and it was really just a bunch of young people in that scene who loved the question everything mentality of punk the arts the aggressive music but weren't so interested in kind of the heavy drugs and alcohol use that were that were really going on in the scene at that time
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And so there were a couple of bands, the Teen Idols and then more famously Minor Threat, who promoted kind of an alternative.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And Minor Threat wrote this song called Straight Edge. And the idea being that one shouldn't be picked on or judged for the fact that they don't want to use, that there are other paths.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And it was really a statement for individuals to live life in the way that they wanted to live life.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: But it must have struck a chord because even pre-internet age, it caught on all across the U.S. and soon beyond.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And now, in 2023, is a worldwide movement with young people in many, many countries adopting the universal symbol, the X, on the hand or in a tattoo or on a shirt to proclaim their allegiance to that identity.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: Grown-up Ross still doesn't drink, and now he's a professor and the chair of sociology at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I asked him why there's so much less of a stigma associated with abstaining from alcohol in 2023.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, attitudes have just shifted and there's not one perfect explanation for that.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And I think it's important to note that there's declines in drinking, especially amongst young people, in many different countries, you know, across Western Europe, across North America, Australia, New Zealand.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And this is really something bigger than any one country or one state or one city.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: Speaking for the U.S. case in particular, there was a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the pediatrics version of that journal, that looked at young people from 2002 to 2018.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: The number of college students that choose not to drink, that abstain completely, rose from 20% in the early 2000s to just about 28% in 2018.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: And the same was true for non-college folks who are almost at 30% choosing not to drink.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Teen drug use in the United States is in decline. A government study finds that the overall use of alcohol, marijuana, prescription medications, and illicit substances dropped among American teens last year.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But why? What are these kids doing instead? Are they vaping? Are they spending all their time on TikTok? What is it? I hear they're not having sex either.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: You know, I have to say that as much as previous generations want to sort of say kids these days have it so easy that just not the reality for young people today who I think in many ways experience a very uncertain future.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: I mean, all of the social problems that many of us think about on a daily basis, but they're just a little more risk averse. They don't want to do anything that might jeopardize their future prospects.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: They're not even sure if they work hard and go to university, if they'll be able to pay off their student loans or get a good job or just have a reasonable standard of living.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: So there's just a lot more of kind of being careful, you know, planning for the future.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And then on top of that, I think that this decline in drinking in some ways overlaps with the rise of social media.
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--:-- Ross Henfler: According to Pew Research, 97% of U.S. teenagers go online every single day and 46% say they're almost constantly online.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: 54% of teens say it would be really hard to give up social media.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: Some young people feel like they're under constant surveillance.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: So anything that they do while intoxicated could be recorded by anyone.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And they could be, you know, the next meme circulating at their high school or their, you know, their workplace or their university.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hey, my name is Dagan. I am fighting for sobriety.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are we seeing residual benefits in society? Are there fewer alcohol-related deaths? Are there fewer instances of, you know, drunk driving? Do we yet see the sort of payoffs of fewer young people drinking beyond their health, presumably?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: Right. Yeah. I'm not so sure we're seeing a lot of those payoffs quite yet.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: But I think it's a really powerful thing to note that the heavy drinking of the 1990s and into the early 2000s wasn't just a natural state of affairs.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: It wasn't just something that was going to happen regardless. Like there were industries that were promoting this and profiting from connecting youth culture especially to alcohol use.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello. Hey, who? What's up? Nothing, B. Just watching the game, having a bud.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's up with you? What's up? You know, we find ourselves in, you know, kind of a culture where alcohol is almost inseparable from most social gatherings, no matter what your age.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when you say, let's grab a beer, it's never just about the beer. Come on, I'm buying you a beer. Okay.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: Yeah, I feel like I'm finally in better company.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: So I haven't had alcohol for well over 30 years at this point.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: That means I went through my later high school years, all of my college and graduate school years and beyond being sober and often being the only person who was sober in my social circles.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And so now to see people that have never heard of punk or straight edge, sometimes identifying as straight edge, even if they're not in the hardcore scene, it's kind of wild, actually.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: It's a little surprising. But for me, I just always wanted people to have a better sense of themselves and their choices.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: And we think of peer pressure as something that middle schoolers have to deal with, not adults who are supposed to grow out of that.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: But the fact is, is our social surroundings create our opportunities and constraints and going against that grain can feel tough.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Ross Henfler: So having gone against that grain for several decades, it feels good to see that that's beyond my little punk rock scene and is now more widely accepted.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was made by Amanda Llewellyn and Miles Bryan with help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, and Afim Shapiro.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Bill Schufelt at Athletic Brewing.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief pause]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. Thank you.
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