Light begins to dawn?

The Morning Advertiser reports that CAMRA has called upon the government to revise the official advice on daily alcohol units.

In its submission to the Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into alcohol guidelines, the consumer organisation argued that the current guidelines fail to take into account the latest medical evidence.

CAMRA also claims that the Government is failing to adequately communicate the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.

Is this a belated recognition that more has to be done to resist the tide of pseudo-scientific anti-alcohol claptrap, especially when the underlying message put across by the anti-drink lobby is increasingly moving towards “there is no safe level of alcohol”?

It is significant that CAMRA also said:

The guidelines seem to portray the recommended allowance as an absolute upper limit, which is not the case. There is, in fact, a wide gap between the safe recommended limit and the point where drinking will have a severe health impact.

That is one of the key problems with the current advice. The guidelines themselves are not bad advice as such, except in terms of needless over-caution, but it often seems to be assumed that exceeding them leads to falling off a cliff of risk. This is on a par with suggesting that only eating four portions of fruit and veg a day will inevitably lead to contracting scurvy.

It also results in skewed priorities in public policy, with health campaigns often giving the impression of trying to make responsible people drinking 30 or 40 units a week feel guilty, while in effect washing their hands of those drinking at genuinely dangerous levels of 100 units a week or more.