According to Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer(CMO) for England, “drinking any level of alcohol regularly carries a health risk for anyone, but if men and women limit their intake to no more than 14 units a week it keeps the risk of illness like cancer and liver disease low”.
She was speaking after introducing new draconian drinking guidelines which essentially advise that there is no safe level of drinking for either sex.
Her scientifically correct yet somewhat startling advice to legislators and the public is that any amount of alcohol consumption increases the risk of a range of different cancers.
The 14-unit figure is apparently the level expected to cause an overall lifetime risk of death due to alcohol of about 1 per cent, according to the expert committee which advised the CMO.
And yet a member of that committee has confirmed there is little evidence regarding the impact of any guidelines in changing health behaviours. Which makes it difficult to see the change in guidance as anything other than an unwelcome interference by the “nanny state”.
In fact, it could be seen as an especially bad example of official health scaremongering.
In response I was pleased to see Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge, ask: “So should we feel okay about risks of this [1 per cent] level?
Source: Muiris Houston, The Irish Times, 16/02/16
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