I’d rather snort Scotch than eat a veggie burger on Paleo bread. 
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I did strict paleo many years ago. I got too thin. My doc fussed at me.
I didn’t stop drinking when I did it, though.
You do realize that “being Paleo” doesn’t mean that you must eat veggie burgers or eat a vegetarian diet?
I only mentioned Paleo bread in order to avoid the minimal amount of alcohol that’s in regular bread that uses yeast, as @mtmind pointed out above.
As for me, I’m not strict Paleo. If asked, and I’m often asked, then I typically tell people that “I’m mostly Paleo.”
Did you read the paper the NYT article referred to? It doesn’t say alcohol increases the risk of atrial fibrillation in the general population. It says alcohol increases your risk of atrial fibrillation if you already suffer from atrial fibrillation. EVERY participant had paroxysmal atrial fibrillation.
The Harvard publication references the same study. Yet, both the NYT and Harvard publication lead with the same click bait headline…Alcohol increases the risk of aFib.
I’m done debating quick google searches designed to bolster an already held dogmatic opinion. If you don’t want to drink…don’t. No one is trying to convince you otherwise.
That’s the bottom line. Not sure there is anything else to say.
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I have no idea what Paleo is. I’ve never been on any type of diet. I’ve always eaten whatever I want.
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We all have diets. Your diet is “see food.” 
My diet is what I eat each and every day of my life, forever.
As do I. For example, I don’t want or need alcohol. There’s no appeal to me whatsoever. A complete waste of calories. And I assume that’s why the declining sales of the alcoholic beverage industry. Others are figuring it out for themselves.
Of course. That is exactly what I said, and what both articles said. Not sure why, but you aren’t accurately representing either article, or my position.
First sentence of NYTimes article, with my emphasis . . .
A new study has found that consuming alcohol, even as little as one can of beer or one glass of wine, can quickly increase the risk of a common type of cardiac arrhythmia known as atrial fibrillation in people who have a history of the condition.
First sentence I quoted above from the Harvard article . . .
For people who already have afib, alcohol appears to have a nearly instantaneous effect on their heart rhythm, according to a recent study.
When I first introduced AFib:
There is no deception. No misrepresentation.
As for your comments about my supposedly “dogmatic” approach, I have no idea to what you refer, but whatever it is you seem to be mistaken.
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LOL! I don’t read labels. I don’t care about calories. I don’t have apps to police my food. You’re 100% correct, I see food and eat it. It tastes good.
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So, you have no idea whether you’re drinking a Budweiser, Guiness or Stella Artois beer, huh?
Labels are educational. And I love being educated on what goes into my food or the products I use. We obviously have much different goals in life. You love the way you live, as do I. I feel extremely fortunate.
As for “tastes good,” that’s what the Matrix is telling you when you eat steak and drink your Ketel One Gimlet.
I don’t read labels because I generally avoid the middle isles of grocery stores. An apple is an apple, and a potato is a potato. I’m thankful that I can afford to feed my family nutritious food made by myself from scratch. Many can’t.
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Exactly. My earlier comment regarding using the Yuka app was not for food, but for changing our hair shampoo.
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Ain’t no matrix. It does taste good!
Red meat, along with eggs, get routinely vilified based on epidemiology, where the very few controlled prospective studies show no increased risk.
I keep looking for citation of any study that unambiguously shows a true deleterious effect of the one-drink-a-day level of alcohol consumption. In their absence I have to trust my lying eyes - a fairly long lifetime in which what I know about myself, most of my friends and the larger world have failed to confirm any such thing.
What it does confirm is how easy it is to screw up the moderate part of consumption - either in a particular instance of over-indulgence (I have first-hand evidence of this!) or starting down a path culminating in outright alcoholism. These are real dangers and are valid reasons to avoid strong waters. Such common sense observations lay behind the many warnings of our ancestors. They’re compelling enough on their own terms without this dubious medicalizing of moderate drinking.
The warnings against drink, with all their validity, always come from people who simply don’t get the civilizing and life-enhancing aspect of alcohol. It’s been a solace, a stimulant and a pleasure for us humans from the time we first began to live in towns, cultivate cereals and vines, tell stories and think big thoughts around the fire. Anyone who hasn’t felt this in his own bones isn’t going to know what he’s missing as a teetotaler.
Anecdotes are often disparaged, but they’re the way we understand actual experience. I offer two of them that bear on the validity of medical warnings:
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An old friend of mine with a deep appreciation and understanding of wines was told at the age of seventy that he should stop drinking and do it cold turkey because his heart could no longer take it. I suppose this was based on the research cited above about atrial fibrillation. My friend, who was always attentive to the advice of doctors, obeyed. But abstinence hurt him, and he was no longer his old self and was dead within two years, years lacking the joie de vivre that had always previously characterized him. The loss of the spark that alcohol gives, I am convinced, took him down earlier than if he had enjoyed his life to the very end.
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Another friend of a certain age has been given the same warning for a different reason - problems with his balance related to the natural age-related shrinkage of the cerebellum. He was told that if he stopped having his dram in the afternoon and his hearty glass of red at dinner there was a one in six chance after several years of total abstinence of a “minor improvement” of his condition, though he would never again walk without a walker. Those odds and that result made no sense to him. Thus he’ll go on extracting joy from the vine and the malted barley to the very end. I applaud him. Better to make one’s way to cemetery hill in the company of fellow tipplers than in lonely sobriety.
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Generating unambiguous data/outcomes isn’t generally a goal of many scientific studies. Here is a Lancet published study on alcohol consumption (a meta analysis which come with their own set of weaknesses). The Lancet is a leading peer reviewed journal.
We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext
Here’s another data analysis, also from a peer reviewed journal.
The minimum risk of low-level drinking frequency for all-cause mortality appears to be approximately 3 occasions weekly. The robustness of this finding is highlighted in 2 distinctly different data sets: a large epidemiological data set and a data set of veterans sampled from an outpatient clinic. Daily drinking, even at low levels, is detrimental to one’s health.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acer.13886
Yes, ‘liquid courage’ is a thing. Alcohol is just another psychoactive substance like caffeine, marijuana, amphetamines, LSD, etc.
Could be. But you don’t really know, it’s not unambiguous.
This is a bit offensive and seems quite sheltered. Lots of sober people aren’t lonely and live highly social lives. Some are even the life of the party. The idea that people need a psychoactive substance to be social/not lonely is ridiculous.
ETA: I continue to not understand why people can’t respect the choices of others…have a drink or two a day or don’t drink or whatever, but why criticize those who choose something different. It seems simple.
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@Mwfan1921 , these studies are no more convincing than any of the others I’ve seen. The one in the Lancet makes no distinction at all between bad health outcomes and their relation to particular levels of consumption, and simply leaps to the conclusion that zero consumption is the only safe level. The other study is similarly vague. When a study occasionally gets around to being specific about why moderate drinking is truly and awfully detrimental it usually says somesthing like, “it increases the possibility of cancer [or whatever] by 25 [or something] percent.” Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Except that the possibility in question is already vanishingly small, so having a drink or two makes it a smidgin greater than vanishingly small. If one wants to live one’s life according to such dictates, well, it’s a free country, but I prefer those who candidly admit that they either hate the stuff or they fear becoming enslaved to it.
I’m not a great one for making accusations about offensive turns of phrase, but if I was, I might object to a characterization of the human race’s social enjoyment of acohol as nothing more than “liquid courage.” Let’s just say it’s not the full story.
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Many people that smoke also drink alcohol. Many that drink alcohol have a tendency to smoke while they do, or smoke more. Which causes the cancers? 
I was thinking about your comment: “Lots of sober people aren’t lonely and live highly social lives”
Of course this is true.
It reminded me of when people say, of very neat/clean houses, “I’d rather be comfortable than lonely and bored” - obviously this is also nonsense. Plenty of neat/clean people have lots of friends and are very comfortable in their neat/clean surroundings.
There can be a failure of imagination. When someone thinks that alcohol helps them socialize, or that not cleaning helps them be comfortable, they don’t necessarily understand that others experience the world differently.
What might be true is that someone who likes drinking, doesn’t feel very social in non-alcoholic situations, and that someone who doesn’t straighten their house doesn’t feel very comfortable in non-messy situations. But that’s not generalizable.
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I worry more about people who altered their lifestyle during Covid to avoid infection and never really returned to pre-Covid activities.
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Yes to all of this, and so well said. More awareness of the perspectives of others would likely result in less overall judgment, which is a good thing obviously.
Regarding alcohol consumption and risk, there will never be unambiguous data that support a given outcome/recommendation. People have to do what’s best for them. As risk is shown to increase, some will change their behavior…even if the increased risk is low as applied to a relatively low number, and that’s great.
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