What is a safe level of drinking? Sally Davies says there isn’t one. In so doing she is encouraging the public to believe that the only safe level is zero. But that is not what the epidemiology shows at all. It would appear that you can drink significantly more than 14 units a week — or two units a day — and have a lower mortality risk than a teetotaller.
Why would she misrepresent the evidence? I think there are two reasons. If I may illustrate by analogy, when I first started secondary school at the age of 11, the teachers told us that we would be expected to do three or four hours of homework a night. Even at the time, this struck me as being optimistic on their part. I doubt that any of us were so conscientious. Speaking personally, I recall half an hour being the average, perhaps up to an hour on occasion. Looking back, I think the teachers knew that we wouldn’t do three or four hours. I think they would have been very happy if we did one or two hours. They were doing something that behavioural economists call ‘anchoring’ — putting an unrealistically high number in our minds in the hope that we would settle for a lower number, but that the number would still be higher than the number we would have come up with if left to our own devices. If they had said we should do an hour, we might have settled for 20 minutes. If they had said half an hour, we might have settled for ten minutes. That, I suspect, is what health authorities are doing when they tell us to have no more than seven drinks a week, or to have no more than seven teaspoons of sugar a day. We will probably exceed those guidelines, but we might think twice about exceeding them by two or three times — and those are the kind of levels at which health could genuinely be impaired. If that’s what they’re doing, I think it’s a problem. Manipulating school children into doing their homework is one thing. Lying to adults about scientific evidence is quite another. The health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption are not an ‘old wives’ tale’, as Davies claims. They are supported by a huge body of evidence, but she doesn’t want us to be able to handle nuanced information. In public health, things are either good or bad, and she wants to portray alcohol as bad, hence the need to downplay the benefits and the rhetoric about there being ‘no safe level’. It’s nonsense, but it is a clear message and that’s what counts. Second, there is a distinct possibility that these guidelines are not really aimed at us at all. The number of people who exceed the weekly drinking guidelines has been falling for years. By lowering the recommendations for men, Sally Davies has pulled two million more hazardous drinkers out of her hat. Similarly, although most people exceed the old sugar guidelines, sugar consumption has been falling for years. Now that the guidelines have been halved, it is almost impossible not to exceed them. By moving the goalposts, the problem is inflated, panic ensues, and the political agenda of the ‘public health’ lobby, with all its taxes, bans and gruesome warnings, is given a shot in the arm. There is a telling comment in the minutes of one of the meetings held to reassess the drinking guidelines. It says that it is ‘important to bear in mind that, while guidelines might have limited influence on behaviour, they could be influential as a basis for government policies’. Influencing government policy is the real aim of the game. They don’t trust us to handle accurate information. As a result, we can no longer trust them to give us it.
