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Oh God, again?

The study, published in the Lancet, found that 59% of those who drank harmful amounts were aged 15-39 – people for whom alcohol provided no health benefit and posed risks, including injuries relating to drinking or car accidents, suicides or murders. Three-quarters of harmful drinkers were men.

Well, yes, the things that alcohol is protective against tend to be diseases of age, don’t they? Therefore among the young you’ll not see the benefits, only the costs.

They found that for men aged 15-39, the recommended amount of alcohol before “risking health loss” was just 0.136 of a standard drink a day. For women of the same age, the “theoretical minimum risk exposure level” was 0.273 drinks – about a quarter of a standard drink a day.

For adults of 40 and older without any underlying health conditions, drinking a small amount of alcohol was linked to some health benefits, such as reducing the risk of ischaemic heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Among those aged 40-64, safe alcohol consumption levels ranged from about half a standard drink a day to almost two standard drinks. For those aged 65 or older, the risks of “health loss from alcohol consumption” were reached after consuming a little more than three standard drinks a day.

And how have they pulled out those who did not drink when young, but did when older? To see whether the effects of drinking while young provided benefits when older?

First impressions here would be that this is Tosh. We’ll wait for Mr. Snowdon’s analysis to confirm that thought…..

16 thoughts on “Oh God, again?”

  1. More to the point, in the same vein as economic forecasts containing decimal points, doom-laden “studies” working to three decimal places of the basic “unit of alcohol” is a cast-iron indicator of it being bollocks.

    I think that the late Murray Laver warned against it as “the doctrine of spurious accuracy”.

  2. “the doctrine of spurious accuracy”.
    Currenty to be found in the “Climate Change” industry.
    The whole thing being within the margin of error.

  3. I think they mean “just 0.136 of a standard Grauniad article is sufficient to promote serious brain damage”

  4. @ BiS

    Currenty to be found in the “Climate Change” industry.
    The whole thing being within the margin of error.

    Yep, we can’t trust the weather forecast to say whether it’ll rain tomorrow but we can predict that temperatures will be 1.5c hotter in 100 years time.

  5. @MFish…

    Just looked at the forecasts for the next few days on the BBC and the Weather Channel – there’s at least 2C difference in the maxima between them, the BBC showing hotter (of course!). Isn’t that the next century’s predicted heating? No need to wait 100 years, just switch to the BBC website!

  6. ”’just to add, Tuesday will be clear sun all day (BBC), thunderstorms early afternoon (Weather Channel).!

  7. I wonder if there’s a correlation between younger generations’ alcohol-free (puritanical) lifestyle and the epidemic of mental health problems.

  8. Ah.. That particular Slow March… Teetotallers and Abstainists promoting their own Religion and rattling the Donation Jar.

    They never learn that the single most detrimental thing to one’s personal health is poking your face into the realm of people’s private lives and trying to enfore your pet peeves on it.

  9. I’ve just done a Google search for “who were the beerocracy”, and there’s no information other than waffle about tiny craft brewers! WooOOooOooOooo. What are they hiding?

  10. The impression given by this kind of report is that the nation’s health is in freefall, sedentary overweight drunkards the lot of them. I’ve attended dozens of triathlon and running events where there are hundreds of middle aged and older people who are in superb shape. There are plenty of fit oldies at the gym too, one guy that I swim with holds several British records for swimming, in the 85-90 age group. Maybe these people aren’t representative of the population generally but they don’t paint a picture of a population whose health is going to the dogs.

  11. “who were the beerocracy”: I’ve never heard of the beerocracy. The old expression was The Beerage.

  12. How did they find out how much people were drinking? Was it by asking them? Because that’s so unreliable as to be useless.

  13. Charles… “Self-Assessment”, questionnaires, and Reports manufactured by selected Nobodies because the results matched?

    It was fun looking at the Who’s Who on the website. Nobodies/Career Busybodies and Ministries of Health from… ok…they’re a Nation…

  14. Wine to make glad the heart of man and oil to make his face to shine.
    So N thousand years later some twit thinks that he knows better and that we should only drink one standard drink every week if we’re under 40.
    Try telling that to a rugby team!
    The idea that my safe limit is now twenty-two times the amount it was 40 years ago is ludicrous.
    Do these guys ever think?

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