Dr. Sarah Wakeman
speaker
484 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sarah Wakeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Absolutely.
And it's about effective treatment.
It depends on the type of addiction and their situation, but in most cases it's some combination of psychotherapy and medication.
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the journey of alcohol is fascinating. So first, I think we think of this as a relatively modern thing, but, you know, archaeologists have discovered, like, beer-making equipment in hunter-gatherers' cave dwellings from 13,000 years ago. That's wild. Wow. Like, 13,000 years of people figuring out how to make beer. You know, you look at China 9,000 years ago.
It was really about like a spiritual journey or a social thing. It was never really about health. At some point, we started talking about this as something that is good for your health. Like drink red wine. It's going to improve your health. And that's where I think we got wrong. And the reason why was actually from how we were looking at the data.
So first, if you look at only one health condition, there are some health conditions where a moderate amount of alcohol actually improves your health. But it was also how people were conducting the studies. So in most of the studies, what people do is they take like a massive population, tens of thousands of people, where we have some data where they're reporting how much alcohol they used.
And then we look at health risks over time. And scientists would lump people into sort of non-drinkers versus light drinkers, moderate drinkers, or heavy drinkers. And what they were finding is that people who were drinking even up to the moderate level were actually doing better than the people who weren't drinking at all.
And so that was where that concept that drinking is good for your health came from. And so people talk about this like J-shaped curve, meaning that moderate drinkers actually have lower risks of health problems. And then it's really only when you start drinking very high levels that you start having more risk of health problems than people who don't drink at all.
What they realize is wrong with that is that in the people who don't drink at all, many of those people are not drinking because they're actually really unhealthy for another reason. Like they might have heart failure and they like don't want to drink because they don't want it to mix with their medication. Or they might have had a history of alcohol use disorder and they're actually in recovery.
So they've already had some damage from alcohol and they are not drinking because of that. And so when you change the reference group, you actually make the sort of group that you compare people to, to people who very rarely drink. So it's not that they're not drinkers at all, but they drink, you know, very, very light levels.
Then you start to see that those like health benefits of alcohol go away, especially if you look across all conditions.
Yes, I would never say drinking alcohol is good for your health. That doesn't mean that drinking at what we call low-risk levels can't be a part of a healthy lifestyle. So it's a slight shift that, like, don't fool yourself into thinking that drinking that glass of wine is, like, going to exercise for 30 minutes. Like, it's not something that's going to promote your health.
I think of it more like having dessert, eating bacon, going out in the sun. There are risks associated with all those activities. It doesn't mean that I would say you can never do any of that, but you need to understand what the risks are and then make choices for yourself.
Yep.
Yep.
Well, so part of the challenge is what we think of as one drink. So I think much like, you know, if you learn to read the serving size on a food, you realize that like a serving of ice cream is like a half scoop. It's not like a giant ice cream sundae. The same is true with alcohol.
So in the UK, the kind of low risk drinking limits talk about units of alcohol, which is the equivalent of eight grams of alcohol. So how much of a drink has eight grams of alcohol? And to be in that low-risk category, you have to be below 14 units. The problem is that glass of wine, just eyeballing it, has several units of alcohol.
So it is not a – even though we think of it as a single drink, it's probably – I mean, I have to guess, but it's probably like three units of alcohol.
You'd be right at that limit. The problem is most people don't drink just one glass. If you have two glasses one day and then one glass one day and then three glasses one day because you're at a social function, all of a sudden you're actually quite a lot over that limit.
And you get 14 a week.
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