Is Moderate Alcohol Consumption Dangerous?
About this episode
The episode examines the implications of a recent study on moderate alcohol consumption and its associated mortality risks.
Last month the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (‘JSAD’) published a large data review comparing mortality rates in light-to-moderate drinkers with mortality among people who don’t drink alcohol. The NY Times and others gleefully picked up the story, trumpeting the most provocative finding: Up to 1 in 25 moderate drinkers will die because of their alcohol intake. SAD! As always, the study deserves a close look. For my part, I did not know about the SAD journal, so this was a welcome chance for me to see what kind of SAD research it’s offering. It turns out the SAD paper is a review of earlier studies. No new data is offered. The researchers selected their data from earlier studies of “conditions with established causal relationships to alcohol.” Hmmm. There are only a few such causes of death that are ‘established’. For instance, deaths due to alcoholic liver failure, and fatal drunk driving accidents. Both can comfortably be attributed to alcohol. In contrast, as I’ve written before and shown extensively , on careful inspection almost every cancer that researchers have often claimed is caused by alcohol turns out to have, at best, a fatuous statistical association with…
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