Lies, Damned Lies, And "Intelligent Guesses"
They didn’t know - or couldn’t be bothered to work it out - so they just made it up!
The Times reveals today that the recommended weekly drinking limits of 21 units of alcohol for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987 and still in use today, had no firm scientific basis whatsoever.
Subsequent studies found evidence which suggested that the safety limits should be raised, but they were ignored by a succession of health ministers.
One found that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rate in Britain. Another concluded that a man would have to drink 63 units a week, or a bottle of wine a day, to face the same risk of death as a teetotaller. (The Times)
So those bastards just made up a drinking limit and then stuck to it. A limit that is stupidly low and, actually, nothing more than a so-called “intelligent guess” made by people who must have been deeply stupid. They then passed off their guess as incontrovertible fact.
It really pisses me off that “a feeling that you had to say something” on behalf of the Royal College of Physicians led to the constant demonisation of anyone who exceed these limits. They “were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all” and yet became the foundations of decades of government policy on alcohol.
What this shows is that these arbitrary statistics on so-called “healthy” levels of various substances are utter bollocks. Based on estimations and on the “average” person, they are next to useless at the best of times, and even worse when they are said to be, or taken as, incontrovertible facts.
Source: The Times
