Maggie's Farm

"Drinking is healthy"

The conclusions in this article are the result of misused, misinterpreted and intentionally incorrect statistics. For example the author stated that England has almost half the levels of diabetes, cancer and heart disease when compared with the U.S. Both heart disease and diabetes are driven by genetics and blacks and Hispanics have rates of these diseases in excess of four times that of Americans of Northern European descent. The rate of these two diseases for Americans of Northern European descent is virtually identical with the rate for native English people. So it’s clear that this stat was cherry picked and it seems impossible for the author of a story on this subject to be ignorant of the facts, i.e. he intentionally misrepresented the data.
Regarding the efficacy of alcohol to prevent heart disease there is a statistical quirk there as well. In fact a percentage of people with certain heart conditions do benefit from regular alcohol use. They would also benefit from medical treatment but if the individual is unaware that they have a precursor to heart attack and do not get proper medical care then alcohol will slightly improve their outcome. But the vast majority of people, over 90%, would not benefit from the alcohol in terms of heart disease. But by lumping them all together one could say (not honestly) that alcohol use would reduce heart attacks by some percentage of the general population without noting that the beneficial effect was only experienced by a small percentage. The bottom line is if you do not have a blood clotting problem then alcohol doesn’t reduce your risk of heart attack and if you do have a blood clotting problem you should seek competent health care.
I don’t think anyone who grew up with an alcoholic parent or who had an alcoholic spouse would accept the authors premise that alcohol is good for you. The problem isn’t the man or woman who has a drink when socializing on a Saturday evening or even the person who drinks one or two drinks almost every day. The problem is the person who consumes 5-15 drinks every day and cannot stop themselves from drinking. The harm done by alcoholics far exceeds the good that can be claimed for alcohol consumption.