HAPPY HOUR HERE AGAIN
Sobering study slammed
In what quickly became the world’s most widely circulated science story, a report last week in the Lancet claimed that “the safest level of drinking is none.” Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the wide-ranging study criticized government health boards who merely advocate moderate drinking, writing that they should “consider recommendations for abstention.” It’s sobering stuff, but before you start pursuing Prohibition II, here are some reasons why that Lancet story may not be the final word on happy hour.
THE RISKS OF MODERATE ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION CITED IN THE LANCET STUDY ARE INCREDIBLY LOW
According to the study, if you gather together 100,000 teetotalers, in a single year 914 of them can be expected to develop breast cancer, liver cancer or one of the other 23 health problems known to be brought on by alcohol use. But if you gather together 100,000 people who only drink once a day, 918 of them will come down with those same health problems. Final result? Consuming one drink a day will cause four of every 100,000 people to get sick. That’s an incredibly low risk factor. In an extended critique of the Lancet study, British statistician David Spiegelhalter calculated that, on average, it would take an incredible 400,000 bottles of gin to prompt a single extra health problem among moderates drinkers. With these kinds of numbers, Spiegelhalter was particularly critical of the study’s conclusion that public health agencies should “consider recommendations for abstention.” Wrote Spiegelhalter, “there is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”
… AND THEY MAY NOT NECESSARILY BE DUE TO ALCOHOL
The new Lancet study doesn’t have any new data. It’s a “meta-analysis” of nearly 700 published studies from around the world. As such, it’s a very accurate measure of the fact that drinkers, on average, are less healthy and die earlier. But in a column for the New York Times, pediatrician and health researcher Aaron Carroll wrote that with a pool of data that large, the study is unable to control for “unmeasured” factors that might also be causing drinkers to get disproportionately sick. Drinkers might be poorer or more depressed, while teetotalers might be more likely to jog or take up vegan cooking. Given this, Carroll had sharp criticism for the study’s general conclusion that since alcohol can be dangerous, there is no “safe” amount. “I am sure that I could create a chart showing increasing risk for many diseases from 0 to 15 desserts,” he wrote. “This could lead to assertions that “there’s no safe amount of dessert. But it doesn’t mean you should never, ever eat dessert.”
A RECENT LANCET STUDY CAME TO VERY DIFFERENT CONCLUSIONS
It got way less press, but only five months ago another wide-ranging alcohol study was published in the Lancet. This one also used massive datasets to determine the link between drinking and poor health. The study is no fan of alcohol, an accompanying press release advised people that if they “already drink alcohol, drinking less may help you live longer.” The reason they included the “already drink alcohol” caveat is because when researchers broke open the data for “nondrinkers” they found that teetotalers were at way higher risk for death and sickness than their moderate-drinking peers.
This doesn’t mean that alcohol is medicine, but it does pour a bit of water on the claim that non-drinkers are some magically healthy subset of the population. Ultimately, the study stopped short of recommending abstention, and instead suggested keeping alcohol consumption below 100 grams per week. In Canada, this is equivalent to roughly eight drinks.
JUST TO BE CLEAR, HEAVY DRINKING IS OBVIOUSLY BAD
After years of steadily climbing upwards, life expectancy in the United States has been dropping in recent years, prompting health researchers to blame the trio of alcohol, suicide and drugs. In 2012 alone, 3.3 million people around the world died due to “harmful” consumption of alcohol, according to the World Health Organization. In Russia, so many men died of alcoholrelated causes starting in the 1980s that the country has a recognized demographic of women unable to find husbands.
EXTREMELY OLD PEOPLE OFTEN SEEM TO BE LUSHES
To be clear, people blessed with extreme longevity are often medical anomalies, and should not be used as guides to proper public health policy. For instance, the oldest man in the United States, 112-year-old Richard Overton, pursues the extremely inadvisable habit of smoking up to 18 cigars per day. But it’s worth noting that an awful lot of very old people have lived lives replete with moderate alcohol consumption.
A particularly illuminating 2007 study followed a group of 14,000 seniors for 23 years, at the end of which most had died. Incredibly, the drinkers fared way better than the teetotalers. “Stable drinkers … had a significantly decreased risk of death compared with stable nondrinkers,” it concluded.