Science proves alcohol is fun

[Super Nova]

The truth shall set us free and it's really fun. (It also makes you troll internet forums)

Science proves alcohol is fun

DRINKING alcohol makes people feel better because it produces the same chemicals in the brain as exercising and laughing, a study has proved for the first time.

Alcohol is addictive because it releases endorphins, which are the body's way of making us feel pleasure and reward, the researchers showed.

The stress and pain-relieving proteins are naturally released in the brain and other tissues, producing similar effects to opiates such as morphine.

The discovery of the particular brain regions where the endorphin release takes place could help scientists develop new treatments to help people overcome alcohol addiction.

Dr Jennifer Mitchell, of the University of California, who led the study, said: ''This is something that we've speculated about for 30 years, based on animal studies, but haven't observed in humans until now. It provides the first direct evidence of how alcohol makes people feel good.''

Researchers scanned the brains of 13 heavy drinkers and 12 non-drinkers immediately after they drank alcohol. Their findings, published in the Science Translational Medicine journal, showed alcohol caused endorphins to be released in the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex regions.

In all of the volunteers, larger quantities of endorphins released in the nucleus accumbens were linked to increased feelings of pleasure. Increased levels of endorphins released in the orbitofrontal cortex were linked to a greater feeling of intoxication in heavy drinkers, but not in non-drinkers.

Dr Mitchell said: ''This indicates that the brains of heavy or problem drinkers are changed in a way that makes them more likely to find alcohol pleasant, and may be a clue to how problem drinking develops in the first place. That greater feeling of reward might cause them to drink too much.''


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci ... z1jNf3V5CL

[AiA in Atlanta]

On that note a glass of red wine right about now would hit the spot. Did you read that the studies linking red wine to good health are largely falsified?

[Mattus]

Did you read that the studies linking red wine to good health are largely falsified?

Rubbish.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Did you read that the studies linking red wine to good health are largely falsified?

Rubbish.

Red Wine Researcher Said to Falsify Data

http://news.health.com/2012/01/12/red-w ... falsified/

[Mattus]

Yikes!

While that's some appalling corruption of the science, it does only represent 11 of the 654 studies done on resveratrol and cardiovascular disease that are tampered with. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term ... iovascular

There is still overwhelming data on the cardiovascular benefits of resveratrol and red wine. It's just the particular biochemical signalling pathways that Das was convinced were responsible for the benefit that are now in some doubt.

This sort of cosmetic tampering is unfortunately very common with Western blots. The blots are so very untidy and suffer from non-specific binding that many researchers will tamper with the image to turn something like this




Into something like this.



Often researchers fool themselves into thinking this is okay, because it doesn't change the outcome of the data, it just makes it look more convincing and a better picture for the cover of the journal. Perhaps this case will change some minds... but probably not.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Whew! That half-bottle Cabernet Sauvignon may have done me some good after all last night. Am suspicious of health claims of "Add X to your diet and see benefit Y." It is more important what YOU DO NOT EAT rather than what you do.

[Mattus]

Whew! That half-bottle Cabernet Sauvignon may have done me some good after all last night.

It's a j- shaped curve. Probably the half bottle was too much.

Am suspicious of health claims of "Add X to your diet and see benefit Y." It is more important what YOU DO NOT EAT rather than what you do.

Absolutely.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Any thoughts on the Lipid Hypothesis Mattus? I am in Gary Taubes' camp: the same healthy saturated fat that not only kept us alive but healthy for 2 million years can't be the culprit it has been made out to be since the 1950's.

What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magaz ... all&src=pm

Of course I am eating grass-fed beef, no grains products and certainly no industrial cooking oils - Canola, etc.

[Mattus]

Any thoughts on the Lipid Hypothesis Mattus?

The contribution of lipids to long term chronic diseases like heart attack are very difficult to research. The arterial damage which causes the event, an atherosclerotic plaque, begins to develop in late adolescence and takes some 30 - 40 years to develop into a measurable cardiovascular event like a heart attack or a stroke, so who knows what triggered or affected the rate of the development of the plaque if you can only measure the effects decades later. It would take a whole career to do that one experiment, no body will ever do it.

Working in animal models is equally problematic. Mice are not humans. For example stacking on weight over the entire lifespan is normal for mice. You would expect them to have different lipid metabolism too, given the difference in natural diet.

Nevertheless, it's pretty clear that lipids contribute a great deal to cardiovascular risk in high risk individuals over a 2 to 5 year period, and managing lipids, either through eating less or using drugs to cause the liver to produce less, is very effective at prolonging disease free life on those with already established plaques. While it's intuitive that the same mechanism is responsible for causing the atherogenesis in the first place, the study will never be done to prove it.



But how about obesity? We know that obese people have high lipids, but do lipids cause obesity? Fortunately diet intervention studies do exist. Cochrane is an excellent source for sorting out the real science from the pseudo-science in this sort of area. The jury is still out. Some studies suggest high lipid diets like atkins are harmful, others suggest it works great, at least in some populations. Science can't answer this one I don't think. At least not yet, perhaps not ever.

The author of the NYT articles sums it up quite well, actually;

Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Agreed. This is one that science may never be able to solve completely - What should humans eat for optimal health? Yet there are useful principals. Here is one:



In other words, don't eat the "Neolithic Agents of Disease."