Back in October a little-noticed article about the origin of safe alcohol consumption limits appeared in The Times of London. It suggested that the notion of 21 units for men and 14 for women was a complete fantasy figure. The original figures had been drawn from thin air - or “plucked out of the air” as it was actually put by Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the Royal College of Physicians Working Party responsible for introducing the initial guidelines, guidelines that we’ve followed so slavishly ever since.
The 1987 guidelines arose, it seems, from a feeling that “you had to say something” since the Working Party’s epidemiologist believed that “it’s impossible to say what’s safe and what isn’t” in the absence of reliable data.
And reliable data was not available at that time.
Richard Smith told The Times, “Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee”.
But let’s face it, intelligent guesswork is no more than that: guesswork.
However it seems that subsequent recommendations - somewhat more informed recommendations - to raise these ‘safe limits’ from evidence derived from subsequent studies were simply ignored.
For example such a subsequent study found that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rates in the UK. Another found that a man would have to drink 63 units a week or a bottle of wine a day to face the same risk of death as a teetotaller.
So what does this mean for all the subsequent assessments of public health and those at risk from alcohol misuse over the 20 intervening years?
Are those drinking more than the recommended limits really at ‘significant risk’ here or do we need to take another look at every aspect of alcohol misuse, not just those that suit a particular lobby at a particular time?
May we here at Drinks Industry Ireland offer all our readers a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year…