Lancet Lie Lanced

Last week I wrote:

"A study, published in The Lancet, of 600,000 drinkers found that drinking five to 10 alcoholic drinks a week was likely to shorten a person's life by up to six months.

So farking what!

Allegedly this risk increases with higher alcohol consumption, with those who have 18 drinks or more losing up to five years of life.

For every 12.5 units of alcohol people drank a week it raised the risk of:

• Stroke by 14%
• Fatal hypertensive disease by 24%
• Heart failure by 9%
• Fatal aortic aneurysm by 15%

Suffice to say every crackpot, single issue obsessive and teetotaler will use this to push their anti booze agenda."

As was obvious, this was bollocks research.

Now it emerges that the Lancet article itself proves that the research was bollocks, as it seems that those who don't drink and have never drunk were excluded from the study group.

As per the Spectator:

"With the non-drinkers included, we can see that the new study does not contradict the existing evidence. The mortality risk of those who have never drunk alcohol is 20 per cent higher than that of those who drink 100g per week (12.5 units) and is the same as those who drink 300g per week (37.5 units). (NB. Forget about the ex-drinkers who have an even higher risk because some of those will be former heavy drinkers. It is the never-drinkers who are the relevant control group.)

The study’s authors got rid of the J-Curve by cutting off part of the J! Instead of using non-drinkers as their baseline, they used the most moderate of moderate drinkers and buried the findings for non-drinkers in the appendix. If you look at the data in the study and ignore the editorialising of its authors, the study doesn’t tell us anything we did not already know. 

Moderate drinking reduces mortality risk and is particularly good for the heart. Light drinkers have the best outcomes, but drinkers who consume double the 14 units recommended by the Chief Medical Officer do better than those who do not drink at all."

I concur with the Spectator in that not only were the headlines misleading and wrong, the authors knew that their "research" would produce such headlines; ie the authors were well aware that their study was bollocks!

It's the lie that gets you!


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