Alcohol Researcher Says Alcohol-Industry Lobbyists Are Attacking His Work

https://slashdot.org/story/24/08/11/2349217/alcohol-researcher-says-alcohol-industry-lobbyists-are-attacking-his-work

by MilnerRoute • 2 years ago

49 16 2 years ago

teleforce• 2 years ago

Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health

Very politically correct conclusion statement and yet it's heavily attacked by the lobbyists. Imagine what will be the lobbyists response if the conclusion statement is that any amount of alcohol deteriorate health.

Narhem• 2 years ago

Drinking has dropped off significantly. Unsurprising if there’s going to be backlash against people saying it’s not a good thing to do from the people who stand to make money from it.

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

Rather than just health, i wonder if outside prices have contributed. I no longer gobout and drink...easier to be in with a few cans.

mvdwoord2• 2 years ago

Also comes across as a relatively useless metric. Even if right, which they likely are as far as I'm concerned, the statement says nothing about how much it deteriorates health (as opposed to improving) and besides that, for most people optimized health is hardly the goal of life.

To what degree can we even measure second or nth order effects of human behavior? This just seems like debating a perfectly spherical cow.

sseagull• 2 years ago

I think there’s some context around this. It used to be every once in a while there would be a study or news story about how moderate drinking would actually improve health (“Drinking may be good for you!”).

That has largely been debunked, though.

AlchemistCamp• 2 years ago

Scientific research should optimize for factual correctness, not political correctness.

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

Where by alcohol industry lobbyists he means other scientists (who have advised the British government on alcohol in the past), and one guy who works for a free market think tank. He appears to have simply made up the connection to the alcohol industry.

Meanwhile this researcher is directly funded by the anti-alcohol lobby, which he denies by saying that yes he was the president of a temperance society for years and yes he gets paid to speak at temperance meetings, but because he's not a member of those societies, he's not technically a paid lobbyist. That's a non-sequitur: he is in fact the only alcohol-related lobbyist in this whole dispute.

Good for the critics! Epidemiology is full of outright fake science and they hate it when anyone points that out, the "you're not one of us" reaction is totally standard for this group. The scientific criticism of this work is that it's based on a classic correlation-implies-causation fallacy, and that he cherry-picked six studies out of 107 available. His response to this is that only six studies were "high quality", so his own field produces unusable trash-quality papers 95% of the time!

This isn't a surprising admission. Alcohol related epidemiology has been pseudo-science driven by a thirst for power and status for literally decades:

https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/22/drinking_made_it_all_... (2007)

Safe drinking guidelines 'plucked out of the air'

The UK government's guidelines on how much it is safe to drink are based on numbers "plucked out of the air" by a committee that met in 1987.

According to The Times newspaper, the limits are not based on any science whatsoever, rather "a feeling that you had to say something" about what would be a safe drinking level.

This is all according to Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party who produced the guidelines.

He told the newspaper that doctors were concerned about mounting evidence that heavy long term drinking does cause serious health problems. But that the committee's epidemiologist had acknowledged at the time that there was "no data", and that "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't".

expression1sh• 2 years ago

The actual study in question:

https://www.jsad.com/doi/pdf/10.15288/jsad.23-00283

I'm not going to add any commentary on the paper, other than to say that the risk ratio for all-cause mortality for moderate drinkers in the six high-quality papers they identified is indistinguishable from zero.

In other words two to three drinks per week has not been identified net causing any harm, at least in epidemiological studies.

graemep• 2 years ago

People assume correlation implies causation when it strengthens their case.

They assume correlation does not imply causation when it weakens their case.

Not only true for alcohol consumption. It seems to be true for pretty much anything when people use graphs showing correlations about anything complex.

Its particularly bad with time series data where simple correlations are essentially meaningless (yes, there are more advanced methods for dealing with this).

pengaru• 2 years ago

"all-cause mortality" vs. "any harm" is quite the leap

davidhbolton• 2 years ago

A bit more nuanced attack on Stockwell.

He and his team started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which they added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. They then discarded 103 of these because they didn’t meet Stockwell’s increasingly stringent and somewhat arbitrary criteria. This left 107 studies, but there was still work to do.

... In his comments to the Guardian he more or less admits that he is only doing this because the benefits of alcohol consumption are inconvenient to people like him who want to regulate booze like tobacco...

From https://snowdon.substack.com/p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-o...

witrak• 2 years ago

Would you admit - just for the sake of more balanced arguments - that there's another possible reason for the exclusion of the majority of studies? Like visible bias towards "alcohol in reasonable amounts {is | may be} {good | not making harm} for health" opinion?

Alcohol Researcher Says Alcohol-Industry Lobbyists Are Attacking His Work

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