[jpdus]

Does nobody question how they get from a non-preregistered, 9-mouse study (where the treatment group gets only 6%-10% acoholic drinks and nothing non-alcoholic for 10 weeks) to this headline?

Addtionally:

> First, we did not generate offspring using the cessation males. Therefore, we do not know if the sperm noncoding RNA signature we identified correlates with changes in offspring fetoplacental growth or if the resulting offspring would develop normally. However, as significant differences in the ncRNA signature of EtOH-cessation sperm and epididymal mtDNAcn remained, we speculate that abstinence for 1 month is insufficient for the epigenetic memory of paternal alcohol exposure to abate, likely due to the ongoing stress associated with alcohol withdrawal.45, 46 Furthermore, we acknowledge that our analysis does not distinguish between changes in sperm ncRNAs that are causal drivers of altered epigenetic programming in the next generation versus abnormalities that are merely additional symptoms of alcohol-induced stress.

I´m all for science on alcohol abuse and effects of moderate drinking, but this doesn't look like solid science for me (especially as afaik, there is still very few reliable, double-blind controlled evidence on epigenentic effects at all).

But please correct me if I´m wrong (worked with biotech companies on admission studies for several years but no biologist myself).

[u32480932048]

"Stuffing half a dozen or so mice with booze and not giving them water for months gets them FUCKED UP, so forward this article to everyone whose husband drinks more than one tbsp of beer a week to prove that their child is gonna have all kinds of nasty birth defects" - The Science™

[chiefalchemist]

> I´m all for science on alcohol abuse and effects of moderate drinking

But don't we have that? And have recently been getting more and more of that? Most specifically, as I understand the current science: alcohol (e.g., red wine) in any form and any amount is not good for you. Full stop.

I do drink, still, moderately. But given all I hearing / reading, I'm giving more and more consideration to going dry. The "benefits" (i.e., being social, de-stressor, etc) don't seem to be worth it.

[notatoad]

"not good for you" is not science. how "not good for you" is it? what specifically does it do? can you counter the effects?

cookies are also "not good for you. full stop". but they're also not all that bad for you in reasonable quantities.

[fasterik]

Most claims about whether something is "healthy" or "unhealthy" rely on single studies with small sample/effect sizes. We know that many studies fail to replicate, and in the absence of preregistration there are researcher degrees of freedom for scientists to find whatever they want to find in the data.

I don't know about the current status of alcohol research, but unless there is a large body of replicated work supporting a claim, we should be skeptical of it.

[yamazakiwi]

I would be interested to see how places like Korea or Australia with large drinking populations would differ from dry places.

[ghusto]

Sounds like an easy place to get great data for their hypothesis. Compare places like Saudi Arabia with England. Sure it's messy because of the other factors to consider (since it's not an experiment), but if there are zero cases of what you're looking for, your own experiment is probably wrong.

[powera]

Yup. The headline is "fake science", by and for moral scolds. The study doesn't even come close to demonstrating the headline claim.

[fasterik]

Thank you for pointing this out. Unfortunately, there are many problems interacting here. There is an incentive in science journalism to write the most attention-grabbing headline, regardless of how well it summarizes the research. Of the people who read the headline, only a fraction will click through to read the popular article, and only a fraction of those will click through to read the scientific article. Most people have never heard of the replication crisis, preregistration, or researcher degrees of freedom. Even if this is valid research with valid methodology, the scientists themselves are incentivized to cut corners and come up with catchy, counter-intuitive results. It's all a shitshow that drives the spread of misinformation and public distrust in science.