Two drinks a week? New guidelines are unsupported and puritanical kill-joys
Health Canada funded report wants drastic alcohol regulations, but group's own actual evidence doesn't back it up
New year, new health panic. While “dry January” has been a headline trend for a while now, the Canadian Centre on Substance use and Addiction (CCSA) would like the entire calendar year to get a lot more arid.
Its new alcohol guidelines, released following a two-year research project funded by Health Canada, are alarming on the surface. The public summary, which nearly all subsequent media reports appear to be based on, seems deliberately designed to scare even the most casual of drinkers straight.
However, a deeper dive into the CCSA’s methodology and full 89-page report reveals the evidence to be much less damning than the organization would have Canadians believe. One might go so far as to call it fatally flawed in favour of fear mongering.
“We now know even a small amount of alcohol can be damaging to health,” the public summary says. “Research shows that no amount or kind of alcohol is good for your health.” What follows is a graphic that alleges drinking more than two standard drinks per week increases “your risk of developing several types of cancer, including breast and colon cancer.”
The CCSA touts its new recommendations are based on “combing nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies.” What it hasn’t advertised outside the report’s finer print is that most of those studies were disqualified for reasons that include being outside the scope of the project, straight-up duplicates of one another and not meeting modelling criteria.
This would be akin to me, as a columnist, claiming I conducted exhaustive research of over 6,000 sources on a subject when, in reality, I had simply googled the subject and found 6,000 results of varying quality and credibility — with some not even related to my original search terms at all.
Yet, the CCSA recommends some pretty drastic teetotalling intervention is needed, including “strengthening regulations on alcohol advertising and marketing, increasing restrictions on the physical availability of alcohol, and adopting minimum prices for alcohol.”
Let that sink in: mandatory minimum pricing and harsher restrictions on selling in what’s already one of the most controlled alcohol markets in the western world.
While of course anyone who wants to cut down on drinking for any reason should do so, both governments and individuals should think twice before making decisions based on the CCSA’s questionable risk modelling and panicked headlines.
Health Canada funded report wants drastic alcohol regulations, but group's own actual evidence doesn't back it up
New year, new health panic. While “dry January” has been a headline trend for a while now, the Canadian Centre on Substance use and Addiction (CCSA) would like the entire calendar year to get a lot more arid.
Its new alcohol guidelines, released following a two-year research project funded by Health Canada, are alarming on the surface. The public summary, which nearly all subsequent media reports appear to be based on, seems deliberately designed to scare even the most casual of drinkers straight.
However, a deeper dive into the CCSA’s methodology and full 89-page report reveals the evidence to be much less damning than the organization would have Canadians believe. One might go so far as to call it fatally flawed in favour of fear mongering.
“We now know even a small amount of alcohol can be damaging to health,” the public summary says. “Research shows that no amount or kind of alcohol is good for your health.” What follows is a graphic that alleges drinking more than two standard drinks per week increases “your risk of developing several types of cancer, including breast and colon cancer.”
The CCSA touts its new recommendations are based on “combing nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies.” What it hasn’t advertised outside the report’s finer print is that most of those studies were disqualified for reasons that include being outside the scope of the project, straight-up duplicates of one another and not meeting modelling criteria.
This would be akin to me, as a columnist, claiming I conducted exhaustive research of over 6,000 sources on a subject when, in reality, I had simply googled the subject and found 6,000 results of varying quality and credibility — with some not even related to my original search terms at all.
Yet, the CCSA recommends some pretty drastic teetotalling intervention is needed, including “strengthening regulations on alcohol advertising and marketing, increasing restrictions on the physical availability of alcohol, and adopting minimum prices for alcohol.”
Let that sink in: mandatory minimum pricing and harsher restrictions on selling in what’s already one of the most controlled alcohol markets in the western world.
While of course anyone who wants to cut down on drinking for any reason should do so, both governments and individuals should think twice before making decisions based on the CCSA’s questionable risk modelling and panicked headlines.
