Dismissing decades of research on alcohol and health, the UK’s new
stringent guidelines on drinking bring to mind a quote from champagne lover
Sir Winston Churchill: “Statistics are like a lamppost to a drunk; used more
for support than illumination.” In announcing the new policy, England’s chief
medical officer and neo-prohibitionist Sally Davies scorned the idea that a
daily glass of wine could be healthy, proclaiming it an “old wives’ tale” and
suggesting a cup of tea instead. The policy is said to be based on the latest
statistics, but do these truly shed any new light? We are hardly in the dark
about the effects of wine on health, with many thousands of research papers on
record.
Davies’ fundamental mistake is to judge all types of
drinking the same while focusing the outcome narrowly on cancer, failing to
consider the opposite: that an equally narrow focus on wine drinkers might have different
outcomes when overall health is
concerned. Nothing in the “latest data” counters the fact that on average,
people who drink wine with meals on a daily basis outlive nondrinkers, are
healthier, and enjoy a higher quality of life by objective measures. Davies’
advice to avoid any drinking at all several days a week is similarly imprudent
as it can only serve to encourage bingeing instead of healthy drinking. All
types of drink are not the same, and all types of drinking are also varied in
their effect on health.
The policy shines a spotlight on alcohol and cancer where broad
daylight is needed in order to see the whole picture. But even here the
statements in the new policy take liberties with the facts, with assertions
such as “no level of alcohol consumption is safe” while acknowledging in the
same document that drinking within the guidelines carries the same cancer risk
as not drinking. But even that self-contradictory statement oversimplifies the
question, because the relationship is nonlinear; for wine, many disease
conditions including most types of cancer plot out on a J-shaped curve. In
other words the risk is lower for
moderate drinkers, then about the same, and increasing rapidly with heavy
drinking. Unfortunately for the Brits
and their pub culture, the J curve is shallower for beer. Unfortunately for the new policy, it similary fails when alternating drinking and teetotaling.
Perhaps the UK would do well to heed Churchill’s view on
drinking: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
Comments
Post a Comment