The anti-drinking lobby’s twisted logic

In 2018, the Lancet published a study from the ‘Global Burden of Disease Alcohol Collaborators’ which claimed that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption. This was widely reported and was naturally welcomed by anti-alcohol campaigners. The BBC reported it under the headline ‘No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms’. (Note the cheeky use of the word confirms, despite the finding going against 50 years of evidence.)

The study wasn’t based on any new epidemiology. Instead, it took crude, aggregate data from almost every country in the world, mashed it together and attempted to come up with a global risk curve. As I said at the time:

The study contains no new evidence and uses an unusual modelling approach based on population-wide data from various online sources. If you look at this massive appendix you can see the kind of data they were using. The figures are extremely crude.The authors don’t dispute the benefits of moderate drinking for heart disease but they claim that the benefits are matched by risks from other diseases at low levels of consumption and are outweighed by the risks at higher levels of consumption.