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Showing posts from August, 2018

A single drink a day unsafe? Not so simple.

I wanted this blog to be about the healthy role of wine in everyday life that I observed on my trip to Austria and Hungary last week, not the latest salvo against alcohol from another big study . It’s getting tiresome seeing an important issue being muddled in the search for clarity, and I don’t like the idea that a reasonable person viewing the same data but seeing something else might be seen as an apologist for the alcohol industry. Yet the same mistakes endure, both in the studies themselves and the reporting on them. They are technically correct and fundamentally wrong at the same time. First the happy part: What I saw in Europe, as I have on previous trips, was a view of wine as a normal part of everyday life. Wineries are still often family businesses, with everyone contributing. At a winery in the Etyek region of Hungary we were served by the owners and their teenage daughter. In our wine tasting group was a 20-year old woman from Finland, on holiday with her mother and