this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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The glass of wine is likely due to a selection bias in Tea Total people. Most people who are completely sober, are so either because they are recovering alcoholics, or have other health issues.
Most people who are healthy and have no prior alcoholism issues drink at least occasionaly, which introduces a selection bias favouring people with health issues as strict non drinkers, which causes not drinking at all to be correlated with worse health than drinking occasionally.
Idk... a lot of gen Z people I know just don't drink at all
OP is referring to the j-curve historically seen in studies about drinking. Because researchers didn't control for people who stopped drinking after years of abuse or people who couldn't drink because of other health issues, it looked like having 0 drinks per day led to worse health outcomes than 1-2 drinks per day. Because of that, many health organizations spent decades telling people that 1-2 drinks per day was better for you than 0 drinks per day.
Someone finally controlled for those variables a few years ago, and the j-curve vanished. Most health organizations now say they're is no amount of alcohol that is safe to consume.
So it's got nothing to do with Gen Z drinking habit specifically, and the science has been corrected since. But a lot of people still internalized and parrot the "1-2 drinks is healthy" thing.
i get what you're saying, but what i'm wondering is, while alcohol is bad for your liver and damages your health in that way, it also leads to social occasions and less loneliness, i guess. so you might have psychological improvements; and was that also tested for?
Alcohol on its own does not cause social occasions or reduce loneliness. Plenty of people drink alone, and plenty of people gather socially without drinking.
That said, while the advice from a health standpoint is that no amount of alcohol is completely safe to drink, humans do risky shit all the time for fun or convenience. More people get hurt in car accidents than develop alcohol-related diseases, but no one is stopping driving. The difference in outcomes between people who have zero drinks per day versus 1-2 drinks per day is much less than the difference between 1-2 and 5+ drinks. So occasional/light drinking is still relatively low-risk. It's just not actively good for you as previously thought.
because they can't afford it. prices are up, incomes are down. Gen Z starting incomes aren't much higher than the start incomes of people from 10-20 year ago, but booze prices are triple what they were, i've actually seen them start to come down recently because well, even older folks can't afford $20 cocktails or $20 four packs of beer. when I was 25 $20 got you a 24 pack of craft beer. or a 48 of the cheap shit.
That's teetotal, nothing to do with the nice hot cuppa
Also last time I saw teetotalers being less healthy than occasional drinkers was decades ago before never drinking became normal among the youth as they came of age
Back then the only reason to not drink was to treat alcoholism or a serious problem. Now people abstain because their friends do