Turns out we weren’t the only people skeptical of that study claiming there is no safe amount of alcohol.
David Spiegelhalter, chair, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge is deeply skeptical. The paper didn’t follow the Lancet’s own guidelines for communicating risk, he notes, although the Lancet’s press release did.
Digging a bit deeper, Spiegelhalter found that just four in 100,000 people would experience a serious alcohol related condition. To have just one extra health problem, 25,000 people would have to drink a combined 400,000 bottles of gin.
As for the paper’s conclusion that public health bodies should “consider recommendations for abstention,” Spiegelhalter comments tartly:
“But claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention. There is no safe level of driving, but government do not recommend that people avoid driving.” Read his entire argument here.
Meanwhile, Dr. Aaron E. Campbell, the associate dean for research mentoring, Indiana University School of Medicine also cast a critical eye on the study. He began by noting that the study wasn’t a new trial. It was a merging of data from many observational studies.
That’s different than, say, The China Study, the groundbreaking study by a Cornell University nutritional biochemistry professor and researchers from the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine and Oxford University.
It concludes people eating a predominantly whole-food, plant-based diet—avoiding animal products as a main source of nutrition, including beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, and milk, and reducing their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates—will escape, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases.
The study looked at mortality rates from cancer and other chronic diseases from 1973–75 in 65 counties in China; the data was correlated with 1983–84 dietary surveys and blood work from 100 people in each county.
The research was conducted in those counties because they had genetically similar populations that tended, over generations, to live and eat in the same way in the same place.
The study concluded that counties with a high consumption of animal-based foods were more likely to have had higher death rates from “Western” diseases, while the opposite was true for counties that ate more plant-based foods.
In his New York Times article IU’s Campbell notes “very small differences are real, but that doesn’t mean those differences are critical.”
“For each set of 100,000 people who have one drink a day per year, 918 can expect to experience one of the 23 alcohol-related problems in any year. Of those who drink nothing, 914 can expect to experience a problem,” Campbell writes. “This means that 99,082 are unaffected, and 914 will have an issue no matter what. Only 4 in 100,000 people who consume a drink a day may have a problem caused by the drinking, according to this study.
“At two drinks per day, the number experiencing a problem increased to 977. Even at five drinks per day, which most agree is too much, the vast majority of people are unaffected.
“Just because something is unhealthy in large amounts doesn’t mean that we must completely abstain. A chart in the study showed rising risks from alcohol from 0 to 15 drinks.
“Consider that 15 desserts a day would be bad for you,” Campbell writes. “I am sure that I could create a chart showing increasing risk for many diseases from 0 to 15 desserts. This could lead to assertions that ‘there’s no safe amount of dessert.’ But it doesn’t mean you should never, ever eat dessert.
“Food is not medicine. Neither is alcohol. Alcoholism is terrible. There’s a balance, and we could spend lifetimes arguing over where the line is for many people. The truth is we just don’t know.”
We need better studies, Campbell writes. “One was in the works recently, but it was shut down after The New York Times reported on ethical concerns about the way it was being pitched to and funded by industry. That doesn’t mean that a different trial wouldn’t be of public interest and worth public funding. If we want to get better answers to the harms and benefits of light to moderate drinking, that may be our only course,” Campbell concludes.