Not enough of the hard stuff
If you want to get scare stories into the news about our eating or drinking habits, simply say they’re as harmful as smoking, and panic headlines will be sure to follow.
In the past few months, there have been two examples of this kind of scaremongering about drinking. “How many cigarettes are there in a bottle of wine?”was the bizarre title of a research article published in BMC Public Health at the end of March.1
Close on its heels was another article,2 this time in noted medical journal The Lancet, generating headlines such as, “Even one drink a day increases stroke risk.”One of the senior authors was quoted as concluding, “The alcohol industry. . . should be regulated in a similar way to the tobacco industry.”
These two alcohol studies had been published in reputable journals, so the media understandably took the press releases at face value. However, careful scrutiny of the full texts of the actual papers reveals that these studies add little of value to the many thousands of alcohol research papers published in the last 50 years, with methodology weaknesses that leave them far from conclusive.
Each paper expresses
