Alcohol Researcher Says Alcohol-Industry Lobbyists Are Attacking His Work

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.

> 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.

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...

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".