this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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This is just silly. Every single thing they list can be caused by something other than alcohol except for fetal alcohol syndrome. From from the "root."
By that logic, is it silly to say that the root issue of someone's heart stopping was the bullet that passed through it, because a knife through the heart was the root issue that caused someone else's heart to stop?
There's different ways to get dementia. Alcohol consumption is the root cause of one of them, as well as 61 other diseases. If you get dementia and they run tests, they might find that the root cause of your dementia is alcohol consumption. They might find it's a different toxic substance you were exposed to, or they might find it was genetic. That's the root cause of your dementia. The study and article obviously aren't saying that alcohol is the root cause of everyone's dementia, or the 61 other diseases it causes.
It is saying that someone who wouldn't have otherwise dealt with dementia or 61 other diseases could get them purely due to alcohol consumption, making it the root cause of their disease.
« Could » is the word. It literally means: we don’t know. It stays an assumption.
BTW, was Paracelsus considered in the study?
If you get a disease that you wouldn't have gotten had you not consumed alcohol, then the alcohol consumption is the root cause of your disease. The study found 61 diseases for which this is the case for different people
As I said, the root cause of many people's heart stopping has been a bullet passing through it - those people's hearts wouldn't have otherwise developed massive holes and would have gone on ticking had it not been for the bullet - but that doesn't mean that bullets piercing hearts is the exclusive reason that hearts stop.
I'm not sure if the point you're trying to make is that not everyone who consumes alcohol gets these diseases or that alcohol consumption isn't the only cause of these diseases. Both of those statements are correct but neither are contrary to the study's conclusion.
You cannot compare a bullet passing through a heart - an entirely physical process - with diseases from cancer - complex biochemical processes. This is statistically and logically wrong - like comparing apples and oranges, although your example is even more wrong. Apples and oranges are at least fruits, but heart and cancer?
The entire field of ontology is complex in itself. I agree that alcohol CAN (!) increase the chance to get cancer, but - again - Paracelsus plays an imminent role, which is even not considered! Also possible interactions with all the other environmental, psychological etc variables are missing. This diminishes considerably the value of this study.
If I have time and the motivation, I could dig deeper into the design. But it seems to have remarkable flaws and thus makes it in the context of medicine and science a pub, which should be considered with caution!
The more you write about science, statistics, and causality, the more obvious it becomes that your confidence is doing the heavy lifting where methodological understanding should be.
Discouraging is only that there are still people like you around who think they have a clue, while after just a few comments it becomes obvious that they know very little about the subject they are talking about. Mentioning Occam's Razor, a basic concept, which you even managed to misinterpret, was clear evidence of that. Even worse, instead of engaging in a technical discussion like someone genuinely interested in science would do, you increasingly turned the conversation into amateur psychoanalysis about my ego. That told me everything I needed to know. You are free to continue writing comments, but I won't be answering them. If you consider that a win, that's entirely up to you.