The federal government is considering changing what counts as moderate drinking for a man. The 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has suggested lowering the standard from two drinks a day to one. (And no cheating with those oversized Reidl wine balloons.)
No one maintains that heavy-duty drinking is good for you. Drain enough bottles and your liver is likely to cry uncle. Various cancers — mouth, throat, gullet — are more likely to afflict those who drink to serious excess than those who don’t drink at all.
Those risks notwithstanding, “moderate drinkers have a lower mortality than abstainers,” according to an article in the British Medical Journal by Michael Marmot, a professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London. This is due, he wrote, “largely to the lower death rate from coronary heart disease among moderate drinkers.” And by “moderate” drinking, his study meant up to three drinks a day. In other words, alcohol is so beneficial to heart health that it can outweigh the dangers associated with strong drink even in quantities that give health bureaucrats the vapors.
Marmot was writing decades ago. Perhaps science has, in the intervening years, surpassed his work. Perhaps it’s been shown that there is no benefit to heart health from some wine, a beer or two, or a wee dram. One thing is for sure: There’s been no shortage of scientists looking to knock down the prevailing wisdom Marmot helped to establish. In the face of relentless attacks on methodology and data collection practices, the evidence that adult beverages can be good for the ticker has held up.
How wonderful, though, the barroom fight among epidemiologists has been. A consensus was established. Then, that consensus came under withering fire. Those who challenged the status quo were not dismissed as “deniers.” Their objections were taken seriously. Their hypotheses were tested. It may have gotten heated at times, but Marmot maintained that the criticisms of his work “were all credible” and led him to look at the scientific questions from different angles. His essay, “Reflections on alcohol and coronary heart disease,” in the August 2001 edition of the International Journal of Epidemiology, is a rare example of graciousness and intellectual modesty in an age when “science” is just another word for “shut up and do as you’re told.”
One of those do-as-you’re-told outfits is the federal government, with its Dietary Guidelines for Americans. According to the 2015-2020 edition, “The Dietary Guidelines does not recommend that individuals who do not drink alcohol start drinking for any reason.”
There are several studies that insist alcohol be abjured. But there is a tendency to focus on the many negatives associated with drinking without giving much attention to its benefits.
For example, the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute allows that alcohol consumption has been “associated with decreased risks of kidney cancers, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in multiple studies.” But the National Cancer Institute is quick to step away from those findings: “Any potential benefits of alcohol consumption for reducing the risks of some cancers are likely outweighed by the harms of alcohol consumption.”
To prove the point, the National Cancer Institute highlights “a recent study that included data from more than 1,000 alcohol studies and data sources, as well as death and disability records from 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016, concluded that the optimal number of drinks to consume per day to minimize the overall risk to health is zero.”
Well, that’s that, it would seem, for any talk of reductions of kidney cancers and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Or at least it would be if the National Cancer Institute didn’t sheepishly add this caveat: “That study did not include data on kidney cancer or non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”
In any case, once this column is done, I plan to go give my kidneys some preprandial preventive care. During dinner, I might just tend to my cardiovascular system.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How's Your Drink?
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October 09, 2020 at 10:00AM
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