Alcohol - Good For You?

[mushroom]

Ginger said:

I read a book where a woman was being fed small quantities of arsenic by a psychopath. It didn't kill her. It made her have really bad stomach pains and she kept throwing up. It would have killed her in time, but arsenic isn't like cyanide. Just a tiny amount of that is enough to kill you instantly.

Hehe, sorry for going a little off topic there

*shrugs* Iodine is essential to proper thyroid function (and abnormal thyroid function is very serious), but too much is just as problematic as too little. The only difference between a lot of toxic substances and a lot of beneficial substances is the amount that starts to be harmful.

This isn't exactly off-topic--I read about experiments where researchers gave plants a certain deadly poison (I'm thinking it was arsenic) in varying amounts; the ones who got very small amounts of the poison grew better than both the ones who had none and the ones who had larger amounts. So, since it seems to work that way in people with alcohol, maybe we ought to be revisiting the medical advantages to taking arsenic

[Oily]

Huggsy said:

The more people develop, the more likely it is that the creations of that era are more likely to be harmful. Cars, Alcohol, CFCs, Meepits, its all the same. Im not saying going back to the stone is is the solution, but if people stopped and thought about possible subsitutes the world would be a much better place.

Well, true, but harmful things also have beneficial side effects. Like alcohol does. And without cars, there wouldn't be a lot of things and a lot of people - ambulances to take people to hospital, cars to drive to work, work perhaps on the latest medicines or technology. DDT is a harmful pesticide that can bioaccumlate to poison fish, water and birds, but it's also saved millions from malaria. Everything had its downside, and substitutes do get developed. But without technological progress, we'd still have millions dead from disease and disaster.

KKM said:

This isn't exactly off-topic--I read about experiments where researchers gave plants a certain deadly poison (I'm thinking it was arsenic) in varying amounts; the ones who got very small amounts of the poison grew better than both the ones who had none and the ones who had larger amounts. So, since it seems to work that way in people with alcohol, maybe we ought to be revisiting the medical advantages to taking arsenic

Well, you can built up resistance to various poisons by taking small doses of them. Obviously, you may want to check the poison doesn't have an a cumulative effect