These killjoys are the REAL menace to our health
THE American comedian Henny Youngman once joked: ‘When I read about the evils of drink, I gave up reading.’ A dose of this kind of irreverent scepticism is needed when considering the Government’s latest official guidelines on safe drinking, which appear to be based more on killjoy puritanism than hard science.
The panel of experts that produced the guidelines in January recommended the safe drinking limits for men should be cut to the existing level for women of just 14 units per week (the equivalent of only seven pints of beer) — a draconian halving of the previous guidelines, which had stood for 20 years.
The panel’s proposal was eagerly taken up by Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies, an expert in blood disorders, but not alcohol. That probably explains why she appeared not to question the panel’s views that cancer lurks in every drink, and ‘there is no safe level of alcohol intake’.
Temperance
The new guidelines provoked an outcry, for by recommending that men and women should restrain themselves to 14 units, they not only failed to recognise the alcohol-processing differences between the sexes, but also blithely ignored a wealth of evidence pointing to the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.
The extreme nature of both the new advice and Dame Sally’s grim language provoked concerns that the panel had been motivated by a narrow, censorious political agenda rather than a genuine determination to improve public health.
Now, those suspicions have been dramatically confirmed by revelations about the disproportionate influence wielded on the panel by the anti-alcohol lobby.
According to news reports yesterday, four of the key figures involved in producing the guidelines were members of the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), a pressure group that has its roots in the Temperance movement, being partly funded by Alliance House Foundation, an organisation that advocates ‘ total abstinence from drinking’.
Among IAS supporters drawing up the new guidelines was Professor Petra Meier of Sheffield University, the de facto academic headquarters of Britain’s antialcohol lobbyists. Another leading figure on the advisory panel was Sir Ian Gilmore, chairman of the Alcohol Health Alliance.
As a liver specialist, Gilmore does have professional knowledge of alcohol and health; however, the fact he only sees the casualties of alcohol in his work, and not its beneficiaries, has to my mind given him serious tunnel vision about alcohol’s harms.
In the past 15 years he appears to have made it his life’s work to demonise alcohol by exaggerating its health dangers and condemning anyone who manufactures it.
I say this as a science writer and journalist who has intensely researched the effects of alcohol on health and rigorously combed through thousands of scientific papers — many in prestigious medical journals — while writing on the subject.
But I am not the only one to have made this observation. Speaking of the panel’s workings, one scientist who wanted to remain anonymous said there has been a drive ‘by temperance activists’ to ‘demonise alcohol in the same way as cigarettes’.
January’s new weekly- unit guidelines were a triumphant step on the path to the ultimate goal: to suppress alcohol usage by employing the same legal means as with tobacco, such as health warnings on bottles.
I kid you not; I’ve attended two parliamentary committee meetings in the past month where this Prohibitionist end-game was made abundantly clear.
But comparing tobacco and alcohol is nonsense. It just shows how warped their thinking is.
Tobacco is a genuinely dangerous substance with no health benefits whatsoever beyond the transient ability to relax its users.
Booze is totally different. It is a rather strange paradox: at very high intakes, alcohol can be harmful like tobacco, but at lower levels — even quite substantial intakes — its dangers plummet.
For example, female heavy smokers have a 25 times increased risk of lung cancer, but heavy women drinkers have hardly more than a doubling in risk of breast cancer. That is about the same as men’s extra risk of bladder cancer from drinking tap water as opposed to bottled water.
Yes, the water from your tap is carcinogenic because of chlorine residues it contains. And when have you ever heard Dame Sally warning us off our kitchen taps? She doesn’t because the benefits of drinking clean chlorinated water outweigh the cancer risks.
The same principle is true with alcohol. At moderate intakes, it has been found to have beneficial effects — often ‘on a par with pharmaceutical drugs’, according to many studies.
I am not advocating that everyone should go out and get sloshed, for heavy alcohol use is clearly dangerous. But Dame Sally was indulging the worst kind of nannyish finger-wagging when she told MPs recently she wanted women to ask themselves, each time they reached for a glass of wine, if they wanted to increase their risk of cancer.
It’s true — drinkers do run some some small extra risks of cancer, but these are vastly outweighed by alcohol’s benefits in preventing today’s three major health threats: heart disease, diabetes and dementia.
That explains why drinkers on average live longer than nondrinkers — even non- drinkers with healthy lifestyles.
Benefits
But any suggestion that alcohol might have net health benefits would be a disaster for the treat-alcohol-just-like-tobacco’ brigade. Which is why they have to suppress any good news about booze. Hence Dame Sally’s recent declaration that ‘alcohol’s health benefits are an old wives’ tale’.
A substantial number of medics had always loathed the previous, far more flexible guidelines, formulated in 1995 by a group of impartial civil servants. These officials had looked calmly at medical studies and rightly concluded that a draconian stance would be absurd, given the well- documented evidence for the advantages of drinking, which they alluded to in their ‘Sensible Drinking’ Guidelines.
But this objective, evidencebased approach incensed drinkobsessives in the medical establishment who branded the guidelines ‘ a boozers’ charter’, falsely saying Whitehall was ‘in the pockets of the drinks industry’.
Over the subsequent two decades, while the scientific evidence for alcohol’s health benefits has become more firmly established, the anti-alcohol campaigners have kept quiet about this research, choosing only to publicise the very few medical studies that deny any benefit. (Incidentally, many of these studies have been heavily criticised by the international community of alcohol experts.)
Curiously enough, doctors haven’t always been like this. Astonishingly, NHS hospitals once had booze in their drugs trolleys — they carried sherry, wine and Guinness for patients, because doctors recognised that alcohol had genuine healing powers.
Ambiguous
Even in Prohibitionist U.S. in the Twenties, doctors were allowed to prescribe alcohol as a medicine.
Today, other European countries, less in the grip of dogmatism than Britain, have a much less repressive outlook. In Spain, the guidelines allow for the consumption of 35 units a week, yet the country has a far higher level of life expectancy than Britain.
On average, a man drinking half a bottle of wine an evening will live seven more years than an abstainer. The ideal intake for women is roughly half that, because they can’t process alcohol as efficiently as men.
And the downsides of alcohol consumption have been exaggerated. Drink-related liver deaths are comparatively rare, accounting for just 6.7 of the 200,000 who die every year in the South-East of England, a similar death rate to that for playing sport.
Nor, contrary to Dame Sally’s scare-mongering, is there much evidence of a powerful connection between cancer and alcohol. U.S. alcohol expert Dr Samir Zakhari described the evidence for a link between breast cancer and drink as ‘ambiguous and confusing’.
On the other hand, several studies have shown that alcohol can actually reduce the risks of several cancers, such as those of the kidney, thyroid and blood.
So the idea alcohol is a carcinogen cannot be correct — it prevents cancer as well as causes it.
Perhaps Dame Sally and her friends should consider this conumdrum . . . over a bottle of health-giving plonk.