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A newly released and large study focusing on 195 different countries has contradicted what others have found in the past. This study claims that there is no healthy amount of alcohol that a person can consume because the risks always outweigh the benefits.
It is very important to keep in mind that while this study was the largest of its kind, it was also observational. Meaning it was linking population-wide consumption to population-wide trends, according to The New York Times.
The analysis, involving 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016, relied on 694 sources of data and analyzed 592 studies to determine the health risks of all alcohol use. If you still enjoy a nightly beer or that relaxing glass of wine in the bathtub, though, have no fear. The methods employed in this study left many experts unconvinced.
Online in Medium, David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at Cambridge University in England, wrote of the study’s conclusion: “Claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention. There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving.” And that’s just it. Why do we need the government to recommend or not recommend anything? Aren’t we fully functioning and capable adults who can make these decisions on our own based on reading these studies?
According to the NYT, in 2016, 25 percent of women and 39 percent of men were drinkers. That’s about 2.4 billion people worldwide. Women consumed an average of 0.73 drinks a day, while men had 1.7 drinks. The rates of alcohol consumption also vary widely by country but in general the higher a country’s income level, the higher the prevalence of drinking. The study, which was published in the Lancet, concluded that alcohol consumption is involved in 2.8 million deaths annually worldwide, making it the seventh leading risk factor for death and disability.
“The main difference between alcohol and smoking is that no one is surprised that smoking is bad,” said the lead author, Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington. “But there’s a lot of surprises, even among experts, that alcohol is as bad for you as it is.” But, the increase in risk was negligible. Dr. Gakidou and her colleagues found that just one drink a day for one year increases alcohol-related health problems slightly, to 918 per 100,000 people from 914 per 100,000.
The study concluded:
The conclusions of the study are clear and unambiguous: alcohol is a colossal global health issue and small reductions in health-related harms at low levels of alcohol intake are outweighed by the increased risk of other health-related harms, including cancer. There is strong support here for the guideline published by the Chief Medical Officer of the UK who found that there is “no safe level of alcohol consumption”. The findings have further ramifications for public health policy, and suggest that policies that operate by decreasing population-level consumption should be prioritised.
The solutions are straightforward: increasing taxation creates income for hard-pressed health ministries, and reducing the exposure of children and adolescents to alcohol marketing has no downsides.-The Lancet
So there it is…one more excuse to regulate and tax what individuals decide to consume. The study literally then states that the way to handle a person making an unhealthy decision is to deploy taxation. We knew there was probably a reason to dismiss this study. Any study that concludes less freedom and more theft is the answer is a joke.
Personally, I don’t drink alcohol, but that doesn’t mean others should be dictated to by the authoritarians of the world and stolen from if they choose to partake in a drink of booze. And based on the fact that this study literally called for an increase in taxation on alcoholic beverages and market price manipulation by the ruling class, the rest of it is straight up junk to promote more slavery, in my very humble and voluntaryist opinion. The study then comes across as straight up propaganda because of the approach that was taken.
Read the entire study here.
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