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there are limitations here that warrant consideration. Observational data can be very confounded, meaning that unmeasured factors might be the actual cause of the harm. Perhaps people who drink also smoke tobacco. Perhaps people who drink are also poorer. Perhaps there are genetic differences, health differences or other factors that might be the real cause

There are techniques to analyze observational data in a more causal fashion, but none of them could be used here, because this analysis aggregated past studies — and those studies didn’t use them.

when we compile observational study on top of observational study, we become more likely to achieve statistical significance without improving clinical significance. In other words, very small differences are real, but that doesn’t mean those differences are critical.

Coca-Cola Co.’s KO -0.68% Japan unit plans to introduce a fizzy alcoholic drink in the country, in what the company describes as the first alcoholic product it has ever developed.

Jorge Garduño, president of Coca-Cola’s Japan unit, said in an article posted on the company’s website that it is “going to experiment” with a canned drink that contains alcohol—a product category known as chu-hai in Japan.

Coca-Cola’s Japan unit has long sold many drinks that aren’t available elsewhere, including various teas and coffees and a laxative version of Coke called Coca-Cola Plus that was marketed as a health drink.

For women, just one alcoholic drink a day can increase breast cancer risk,

“The more you drink, the higher the risk,” said Dr. Clifford A. Hudis, the chief executive of ASCO. “It’s a pretty linear dose-response.”

Even those who drink moderately, defined by the Centers for Disease Control as one daily drink for women and two for men, face nearly a doubling of the risk for mouth and throat cancer and more than double the risk of squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagu

Regularly drinking, even in moderation, raises the long-term risk of many kinds of cancer. A burgeoning body of research links alcohol to cancers of the breast, liver, colon, pancreas, mouth, throat, larynx and esophagus. A large new study last week added lung cancer to the list—even for people who have never smoked cigarettes.

For some of these cancers, such as lung, larynx and colorectal, the cancer risk only sets in when people drink heavily—three or four drinks a day on a regular basis. But just one drink a day raises the risk for cancers of the mouth and esophagus, several studies show.

"It's the repeated exposure to alcohol over a long period of time that will cause damage and it has a cumulative effect."

Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility.

The book sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than 40 languages, and Peale, from his pulpit at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, became central to the spiritual life of the family of Fred Trump Sr., his wife, Mary, and the four Trump children, including the future president.

it was also well suited to justifying and exacerbating the pathologies of the Trump family and businesses

The adolescent population is highly vulnerable to driving under the influence of alcohol and social maladjustments due to an immature limbic system and prefrontal cortex.

Synaptic plasticity and the release of neurotransmitters may also be influenced by environmental neurotoxins and drugs of abuse including cigarettes, caffeine, and alcohol during adolescence.

Brain maturation during adolescence (ages 10–24 years) could be governed by several factors, as illustrated in Figure 1. It may be influenced by heredity and environment, prenatal and postnatal insult, nutritional status, sleep patterns, pharmacotherapy, and surgical interventions during early childhood.

Freudenberg’s case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls “the corporate consumption complex,” an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles.

six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name.

All of these industries work hard to defend our “right” — to smoke, feed our children junk, carry handguns and so on — as matters of choice, freedom and responsibility. Their unified line is that anything that restricts those “rights” is un-American.

WHENEVER I write about people who are struggling, I hear from readers who say something like: Folks need to stop whining and get a job. It’s all about personal responsibility.

In a 2014 poll, Republicans were twice as likely to say that people are poor because of individual failings as to say the reason is lack of opportunity (Democrats thought the opposite). I decided to ask some of the poor w

Too often, I believe, liberals deny that poverty is linked to bad choices. As Phillips and many other poor people acknowledge, of course, it is.

Van Gogh dismissed the episode as "a simple artist's bout of craziness" and later a "mental or nervous fever".But research in the Netherlands has thrown new light on his mental state.

Van Gogh dismissed the episode as "a simple artist's bout of craziness" and later a "mental or nervous fever".But research in the Netherlands has thrown new light on his mental state.

Van Gogh is thought to have suffered from a combination of psychiatric disorders, most likely bipolar and borderline personality, but his suspected illnesses have never been diagnosed. According to this new research, it is unlikely that the Dutch painter had schizophrenia. As to whether he suffered from epilepsy, a diagnosis established by his own doctors, the researchers believe it was most likely "masked epilepsy".

Philosophy is one of the oldest areas of inquiry. Out of control behavior fueled by alcohol and other drugs is one of the world’s oldest problems. What could these old timers offer each other? Philosophy has a long, stable relationship with reason and more specifically, the relationship between reason, emotions and the will. Addiction seems to involve a total abdication of reason, a messy tangle of emotions and a lack of will.

In his pursuit of knowledge about the nature of virtues, Socrates first had to debunk popular opinions about them. The debunking took the form of a dialogue but in reality more closely resembled a cross examination. Socrates looked for the essence, necessary property or ineliminable trait that made particular acts pious or just. Socrates interrogated every definition offer

I introduce the notion of addiction as a subject of philosophical inquiry here for a reason. I am a philosopher, yes, but I am also an alcoholic who has been sober for more than 24 years ― only the last four of them as part of a recovery program. I am often a

Frequent memory lapses are likely to be noticeable because they tend to interfere with daily living.

What’s being forgotten?

may cause individuals to get lost in a familiar place or put something in an inappropriate place because they can’t remember where it goes (think car keys in the refrigerator).

By Jaron LanierMr. Lanier is a computer scientist and an author of several books on technology’s impact on people.

I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot.

When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

The eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. "I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic," he said. "I mean, there's stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn't have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. ... The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don't even get me started on Wall Street."

in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.

Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.

For more than a decade, both parties in Washington have mostly looked the other way when mass shootings occur. And they have mostly ignored the 34 victims who are murdered with guns every single day.

prohibit the manufacture and sale of the military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips that have been used in too many mass shootings, including in Newtown. The previous ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. While President George W. Bush supported reinstating it, Congress never acted. The time has plainly come.

fix the broken background check system. Currently, nearly half of all gun sales in the U.S. are conducted without a background check. Criminals, the mentally ill, minors and domestic abusers are all prohibited from purchasing guns, but they all can do so as easily as attending a gun show or going online.

“The word ‘date’ should almost be stricken from the dictionary,” Ms. Silver said. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret.”

Raised in the age of so-called “hookup culture,” millennials — who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down — are subverting the rules of courtship.

Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

In an environment where it is expected -- and sometimes even seems trendy -- to not get enough sleep, it has been hard to remain steadfast with my habits.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommends 7-8 hours of sleep per night for adults, with some variation from person to person. Insufficient sleep is associated with numerous chronic conditions including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and depression.

getting sufficient sleep is not a luxury -- it is a necessity -- and should be thought of as a 'vital sign' of good health."

Recent research indicates that only about half of perceived friendships are mutual. That is, someone you think is your friend might not be so keen on you. Or, vice versa, as when someone you feel you hardly know claims you as a bestie.

“The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art,” replaced by volleys of texts and tweets, Mr. Sharp said. “People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.”

It’s a concern because the authenticity of one’s relationships has an enormous impact on one’s health and well-being.

I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts.

the overwhelming majority of college freshman in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

where is the view coming from?