Four times scaremongering studies on alcohol have been debunked

In the wake of yet another media frenzy over the health impacts of moderate drinking, we round up four occasions when alarmist headlines and flawed studies have exaggerated the negative effects of alcohol.

Another casualty of the demon drink

They come around regular as clockwork: doom-laden headlines warning us to lower our alcohol intake or face dire consequences.

Just last week, UK newspapers screamed that drinking one extra glass of wine shaved years off drinkers’ life expectancies. Professor David Spiegelhalter, a Cambridge academic who led this latest research, said: “It’s as if each unit above guidelines is taking, on average, about 15 minutes of life, about the same as a cigarette.”

This will leave many of us feeling glum, but a closer look at this and similar studies show that they don’t bear up to too much scrutiny. Though drinking sensibly is obviously important, claims linking moderate alcohol consumption to cancer and heart disease have been vastly exaggerated.

Here are four times when alarmist headlines and biased studies have falsely demonised alcohol.

“One drink a day ‘can shorten life’”, BBC

An extra glass of wine can be deadly. Apparently.

Let’s start with the most recent case of scaremongering. Research published in UK medical journal The Lancet claimed that drinkers who consume between 10 to 15 drinks per week risk shaving up to two years off their life expectancy. Any more booze than that could mean up to five years less life.

The report recommended that the government recommendations for alcohol consumption – which are already among the lowest in the world – to be lowered from 14 units per week (six pints of average strength beer or 10 glasses of low strength wine) to 12.5 units (five glasses of wine or five pints).

According to the report, drinking any more than this could increase the risk of strokes, fatal aneurysms and heart failure.

This is pretty strong stuff, yet the BBC’s claim that one drink a day shortened life was still considered to have gone too far. The BBC amended their report and changed their headline to “regular excess drinking can take years of your life” after David Spiegelhalter, the lead researcher, complained the report had been misrepresented.

Even Colin Angus, an alcohol policy modeller at the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group who is usually pretty anti-alcohol, argued that the report was unwise to recommend lowering the UK drinking guidelines to only 12.5 units per week.

He said on Twitter: “While the study has a lot to say that should inform the development of drinking guidelines internationally, it is not appropriate for the authors to say that all guidelines should be set at 100g [12.5 units].”

What’s more, statistician Adam Jacobs highlighted that non-drinkers were excluded from graphs in the body of the report which aimed to downplay the health benefits of moderate drinking.

Turn to pg31 of the study’s appendix and you’ll find that the risk of death for those who had never drunk alcohol was 20% higher than those who drink the recommended 12.5 units, and is the same as those who drink 37.5 units per week.

It follows that drinkers can enjoy more than a mere 12.5 units of alcohol a week and still be just as healthy as teetotallers.

“Do as I do, think about cancer before you have a glass of wine, says chief medical officer”, The Telegraph

UK Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies

If last week’s storm in a teacup seems familiar, you may remember that back in 2016 the UK Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies dropped the UK guidelines for men from 21 units down to 14 units, equalling women’s recommend alcohol intake.

It was the first time the recommendations had changed in 21 years, and Davies also ruled that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption.

At the time the media coverage was enormous, and Davies’ alarmist claims hit their peak when she advised women to weigh up the pleasures of drinking with an increased risk of breast cancer every time they pour themselves a glass of wine.

If there was one way to take the fun out of alcohol, this was it. Davies later admitted that her choice of words “could have been better” on Radio 4.

On reflection however, it is no surprise that the study reached such a damning verdict. Two academics on the panel, Katherine Brown and Professor Gerard Hastings, were paid members of the independent Institute for Alcohol Studies (IAS). The IAS in turn receives 99% of its income from the Alliance House Foundation, a temperance charity whose raison d’être is “to spread the principles of total abstinence from alcoholic drinks”.

Anti-alcohol campaigner Ian Gilmore was also on the panel. He had previously pushed for higher alcohol taxes, minimum prices and a total ban on alcohol advertising. On the whole, there was an overwhelming vested interest in imposing tougher regulations on the alcohol industry.

Thankfully, they didn’t succeed. Research from the University of Sheffield last month revealed that the lowered 2016 alcohol guidelines had had no noticeable impact on drinkers’ behaviour.

“CDC To Women: Don’t Drink If You Aren’t Using Birth Control”, Forbes 

So all women who aren’t using contraception should be teetotal…?

Over to the US, where some poorly worded advice from the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) led to accusations of sexism in 2016.

The CDC advised that any fertile woman who was not using contraception should abstain from alcohol on the off-chance that they accidentally become pregnant.

Telling women to give up booze for the benefit of a hypothetical baby was never going to go down well, and the papers were largely derisory: “Protect Your Womb From the Devil Drink” reported The Atlantic; “CDC Says Women Shouldn’t Drink Unless They’re On Birth Control. Is It Drunk?!?” pondered Slate.

The CDC’s logic was that around half of US pregnancies are unplanned, and a woman will not know if she is pregnant until four to six weeks after conception. The public health body was concerned that women were unknowingly risking miscarriage, stillbirth and foetal alcohol syndrome before they realised they were expecting.

The study also found that three out of four women who reported wanting to get pregnant “as soon as possible” continued drinking alcohol, and concluded that 3.3 million women were at risk of alcohol-exposed pregnancies.

Some experts thought asking women who might conceive to give up alcohol was a little extreme. Amy Bryant, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, told the Huffington Post: “People can take six months to get pregnant. They can take a year to get pregnant. I think it’s a little excessive to say that any women who’s not on contraception shouldn’t drink.”

Little research has been done on the effect of alcohol on pregnancy and if there is a safe amount for pregnant women to drink, so health bodies often advise pregnant women to stop drinking altogether to be on the safe side.

There is no consensus over the risk of drinking alcohol to a foetus before a woman realises she is pregnant. DrinkWise Australia, an independent body promoting healthier drinking, advise that: “If you drank small amounts of alcohol before you knew you were pregnant, be reassured that the risk of harm to your baby is low.” 

“Drug experts say alcohol worse than crack or heroin”, Reuters

Scotch or cocaine, which is the healthier option?

You’d think it was self-evident that relaxing with a glass of Pinot Grigio was less dangerous than snorting a line of coke. Apparently not.

Back in 2010, a UK study by Professor David Nutt of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, published in The Lancet, announced that alcohol was the most dangerous drug in the UK. Heroine and crack cocaine ranked second and third, while tobacco came in at 6^th. Factors used to rank the drugs included harm to users (mortality, dependence) and harm to others (effect on crime).

The criteria Nutt used to rank the drugs made no distinction between legal, widely accessible drugs and illegal substances. The harm of the latter category was underplayed since they are only used by a relatively small number of people. The study also assumed that everyone who drank alcohol abused it.

Nutt said the study showed that “aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy”. Yet the study was widely criticised for its arbitrary system for ranking drugs.

Dr Gilbert Ross, who was working for the American Council on Science and Health at the time, said: “This is a completely inappropriate way to judge the potential harm of a substance. I condemn this study for its faulty criteria and the alarmist headlines that ran with this idea even further.”