Friday, 13 April 2018

Alco-Facts?


There is something a bit disturbing about the claim that drinking a large glass of wine will reduce your life expectancy by 30 minutes (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/12/one-extra-glass-of-wine-will-shorten-your-life-by-30-minutes). There is no doubt that alcohol (a rather non-specifically acting but legal drug) has detrimental effects on human health and people would benefit by limiting its ingestion but I suspect the claim only has a rather spurious accuracy. People are notoriously poor at admitting their true rate of imbibing (they often lie). Other life-event factors including 'stress', socio-economic status, diet, body weight, exposure to environmental chemicals, smoking and using other (illegal or prescribed) drugs will also influence mortality. I suspect that it is not easy to accurately evaluate the impact of these factors in subjects. Although I can see why the claim was made (it has certainly had media impact), I feel that many people will be unconvinced by use of such a specific figure .  

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