UK Cuts Men's Recommended Weekly Alcohol To 14 Units (theguardian.com)

jones_supa writes: Men have been advised to drink no more than seven pints of beer a week – the same as the maximum limit for women – in the first new drinking guidelines to be released by the UK's chief medical officers for 20 years. They also advise there is no safe level of drinking for either sex, and issued a stark warning that any amount of alcohol consumption increases the risk of developing a range of cancers, particularly breast cancer. David Spiegelhalter from University of Cambridge said: 'These guidelines define 'low-risk' drinking as giving you less than a 1% chance of dying from an alcohol-related condition.'

Comments

Re:Bad research

[queazocotal]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Moderate Alcohol Consumption Is Not Associated with Reduced All-cause Mortality.
"During 206,966 person-years of follow up, 7902 individuals died. No level of regular alcohol consumption was associated with reduced all-cause mortality. The hazard ratio and 95% confidence interval in fully adjusted analyses was 1.02 (0.94-1.11) for 7 drinks/week, 1.14 (1.02-1.28) for 7 to 14 drinks/week, 1.13 (0.96-1.35) for 14 to 21 drinks/week, and 1.45 (1.16-1.81) for 21 drinks/week.
CONCLUSIONS:

Moderate alcohol consumption is not associated with reduced all-cause mortality in older adults. The previously observed association may have been due to residual confounding."

Re:Bad research

[queazocotal]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
RESULTS:

Male sex, being physically active, and good health status were independently associated with light to moderate drinking (P .001). An apparent protective effect of light to moderate drinking on mortality was evident in the unadjusted analysis and after adjusting for age, sex, risk factors, and cardiovascular events (adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) = 0.77, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.68-0.88, P .001), but after also adjusting for PASE and VAS, the relationship was no longer significant (aHR = 0.92, 95% CI = 0.80-1.05, P = .19). Follow-up physical activity was associated with baseline alcohol consumption; baseline physical activity did not predict alcohol consumption during follow-up.
CONCLUSION:

After accounting for health status and physical activity, light to moderate alcohol drinking had no direct protective effect on mortality.

Reaction is the problem rather than advice itself

[jareth-0205]

The biggest annoyance here is that we feel we should follow the guidelines - the assumption is that medical guidance should be followed, without taking into account that you are definitely going to die someday so your life shouldn't be about avoiding it at all costs.

If people were immortal except for the effects that might kill us, then yes it makes sense to do your best to mitigate those risks. But we're all going to die after 80 or 90 years of life, so how do you want to spend those years? Starving yourself (mild hunger is best for longevity), eating healthy but borderline boring food, avoiding all mind-altering substances. It doesn't feel like a life, it's hardly exploring the bounds of existence is it? Yes I'm sure some ultra-smug teetotallers will be able to get some sad satisfaction from this news, (yay other people's misery), but given that the human race has *always* sought out chemical mood alteration, perhaps it should be something we accept as a basic need. If not alcohol, then what? There are a bunch of essentially harmless synthetic drugs that we criminalise for no good reason, that at the very least would be better than alcohol.

Discourage alcohol, but then accept that people will take drugs of some sort, so what should you encourage?

Re:This just in:

[fendragon]

That isn't a problem - there are no medical bills when you're dead.

Having just lost a friend whose breast cancer started 10 years ago, I'm acutely aware that if you die of cancer there can be huge medical bills before you are dead. (or there would be, if it wasn't all taken care of by the NHS as it was in this case).

Guidelines Deny Science

[rssrss]

"Boozing is unsafe at 'any level', thunders chief UK.gov quack: Show us your science. What? You mean you don't have any?" By Andrew Orlowski in The Register on 8 Jan 2016 at 16:02

The government's chief advisor on health ignored more than 80 studies to produce her new Puritanical guidelines on booze -- which asks Britons to forego their Friday drink.

Civil servant Dame Sally Davies has drawn up the lowest recommendations in the West: there is no "safe drinking level", her team declared.

The question is what justification was used to get there. The answer isn't pretty for "evidence based" policy.

Repeated studies have shown that alcohol in moderation prolongs life: it reduces the risk of heart disease and strokes. In fact the benefits of alcohol in preventing strokes and heart disease are far clearer than the negatives of drinking.

* * *

Davies ignored over 80 studies and metastudies showing the same J-curve of risk. If you drink nothing, you're at greater risk of heart disease, strokes and living a shorter life than a drinker. The health risk falls for moderate alcohol consumption, with optimal consumption of around 20g (two pints a day for me), then rises for heavy drinkers.

Instead, as Davies isolated, some highly selective statistical methods were used instead. Compare the error bars to the data point. One is bigger than the other.

Yet even here, the researchers found a RR (relative risk) of below 1.0 for almost all groups. Davies simply threw out the evidence that didn't fit what she wanted to say (i.e. almost all of it) and highlighted the evidence that did.