RESEARCH ON ALCOHOL APPEARS TO BE DRUNK ON JUNK.

Back in April, Vinay Prasad, an assistant professor of medicine at the Oregon Health and Sciences University, fired off a tweet: “A team of scientists prove the human thirst for bullshit science and medicine news is unquenchable.” Prasad, an outspoken oncologist with a history of making trouble for corporations and governments alike, was moved to tweet these bon mots on the state of science after reading a study that claimed one more alcoholic drink a day could shorten life expectancy.

The study, in The Lancet, the British medical journal, claimed to have evidence, based on an analysis of 83 different large studies covering 599,912 alcohol drinkers, that an extra glass of alcohol a day could cause any number of killer cardiovascular health effects including stroke and heart failure. A headline in The Guardian said: “Drinking is as harmful as smoking, and more than five drinks a week lowers life expectancy, say researchers.”

While Prasad didn’t use the words junk science, his phrasing seems even more apt for FP Comment’s 20th Junk Science Week, an annual event in which we explore aspects of the global phenomenon that was defined many years ago by Elizabeth Whelan, founder of the American Council on Science and Health. Junk science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risk is exaggerated and the science adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.

The science surrounding alcohol use fits the definition of junk and vindicates Prasad’s initial tweet. In a series of posts a few days later, promoted as a “tweetorial,” Prasad went on to deconstruct The Lancet study as the wonky speculative conclusions of a “genre of utter rubbish nutritional epidemiology research.”

Nutritional epidemiology is the popular statistical practice of establishing possible links or correlations between a factor or agent and adverse health effects. The trouble is that a lot of correlations are likely to be false signals or inconclusive. In a famous paper, “Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer?,” Stanford medical school professor John Ioannidis found various research studies had identified 36 food ingredients that either increased or decreased risk of malignancy: veal, salt, pepper spice, egg, bread, pork, butter, tomato, lemon, duck, onion, celery, carrot, parsley, mace, olive, mushroom, tripe, milk, cheese, coffee, bacon, sugar, lobster, potato, beef, lamb, mustard, nuts, wine, peas, corn, cayenne, orange, tea, and rum.

Finding that people who consume certain foods or drinks also develop heart and cancer disease is not an indicator that the food or drinks cause disease. The same applies to a finding that people who consume certain foods do not get cancer or heart disease. As The Irish Rovers might have put it: It could have been the whisky, it could have been the genes. And maybe it was the cheese. Or even none of these.

Generally, however, most global research on alcohol appears to be drunk on junk, much of it funded by health agencies looking for something to regulate. The Lancet paper received financial support from the U.K. Medical Research Council, the European Union Framework 7 and the European Research Council. The objective of the Eurocrats was to produce research that supported more regulation and more restrictions on alcohol consumption.

It’s a global movement. Mother Jones magazine recently wrote about Ireland’s attempt to apply cancer warning labels on alcohol products. “The Trump Administration Doesn’t Want Irish People to Know That Alcohol Causes Cancer,” said the headline on a story filled with data worthy of another Prasad tweetorial.

In Canada, the latest junkscience attempt to promote alcohol as a cancer-causing scourge took place in the Yukon under the auspices of Health Canada. The attempt mostly failed, but the behind-the-scenes workings of bureaucrats and health advocates were on full display.

Health Canada, in association with Ontario Public Health and officials in British Columbia, had cooked up an experiment that they hoped could be spun into a national and international model of alcohol scaremongering. Using Yukon (pop. 38,000) as a social science test tube, the bureaucrats managed to cajole local politicians into agreeing to a hard warning label on liquor and other alcohol products: “Alcohol can cause cancer, including breast and colon cancer.”

The plan, orchestrated last year with the help of the University of Victoria’s activist Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, was to find out if such labels might encourage people to consume less alcohol.

But a problem developed. Major alcohol-producing corporations got wind of the plan and warned the Yukon government that the cancerrisk claim on the labels was not supported by evidence.

Associations representing national beer, spirits and wine industries said the cancer warning is “a false and misleading statement” and “alarmist.” In response, early this year the Yukon government agreed to drop the cancer warning from the labelling experiment, but not without pushback in the media from the agencies developing the label program.

Tim Stockwell, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research testing the effectiveness of the labels, accused the alcohol industry of making “utterly false” claims, citing the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a branch of the World Health Organization that specializes in what Prasad has described as “utter rubbish nutritional epidemiology research.”

IARC, based on research, has claimed (and then occasionally retracted) “evidence” that coffee, processed meat, and other products cause cancer — although it cannot identify how the cancer is caused. IARC’s main claim to fame today is that it needs to be reformed.

Everybody knows that excessive alcohol consumption is bad for health and sanity, and a potential killer. As for light or moderate consumption, a 2016 paper based on the U.S. Nurses Health Study concluded that “Although moderate drinking appears to increase the risk of colon and breast cancer, these risks are more than counterbalanced by the boost in cardiovascular (CVD) health — especially in middle age and older, when CVD accounts for an increasingly large share of disease and deaths.”

Another study on beer said that evidence “consistently suggests” that there is a lower risk of disease for moderate alcohol consumers than for abstainers or heavy drinkers. And yet another study published this week reached similar conclusions. Among the conclusions for men: “Each additional drink per day was associated with a small increase in total risk of cancer” that was statistically insignificant with the cancer risk nudged from zero risk to two per cent.

The truth is that none of this is helpful or conclusive one way or another.

The only way to get more definitive science on alcohol and cancer would involve a full-scale randomized study. Tim Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta, said such a study would take decades.

Caulfield, who is also author of the book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?, said in an interview that “that there’s no doubt that high doses of alcohol is not a good idea. But the problem is that life causes cancer, and where do you draw the line?”

Pending a comprehensive randomized study, or findings of an actual causal link between alcohol and such diseases as cancer, the message from science is: Have a drink if you want. And two won’t kill you.