I wrote a comment at econlog. The blog
author, Bryan Caplan, seems to meas a sympathetic person (with some less
sympathetic political ideas). Not least because he is a teetotaler! I came into
a discussion with a poster called Z, about the relative dangers of alcohol and sugar.
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The calorie counts are interesting, I think they make my point rather well - I hadn't thought they were that close.
I knew there are fewer calories in beer than in soda, but I meant that the damaging effects of alcohol more than makes up for it. In "moderation", the health effects are small anyway.
However, the cost of alcohol damage in a society is propotional to total use, not number of heavy users. Moderate drinking is harmful in practice, because alcohol-related accidents ("trauma" in the literature) are common in moderate drinkers as well. Also, it seems that when median consumption is low, high consumption is rarer as well. That's reasonable, when you think about it: The more the people around you drink, the easier it is for you to drink to excess as well. And conversely, if everyone you know is like me and Caplan, you will feel a little weird if you drink a lot.
That's one of the reasons I don't drink at all. I figure it's the best way to reduce harms related to heavy drinking (and moderate, too), especially in those closest to me.
But it would be hard to apply the same thinking to sugar. Alcohol is not really very useful, and easy to do completely without (ask me!), but sugar isn't. Also, part of the preventive effect of alcohol abstention comes from the moral challenge it poses. I believe that most people who use intoxicants feel at some level that they ought not to (whether that feeling is reasonable or not).
There is no similar idea about sugar, at least not very wide-spread. While people might feel that the sugar they eat is bad for them, only a few dieters feel genuinely guilty about it. Why should they? In one form or another your body needs sugar.
If people can be convinced that alcohol is beneficial for their health, it will come in the same category. They can more easily convince themselves that they're not just using it as an intoxicant. Consumption will then rise, and damages and overuse as well, for the reasons I've talked about.
So even though sugar is undoubtedly harmful in some similar ways, telling people to switch to beer is a bad idea, in my opinion.
Posted by vintermann at April 6, 2006 02:12 PM