Surgeon General Demands Label War Against Wine

Surgeon General Demands Label War Against Wine

Warning! Do not hit thumb with hammer. Warning! Do not drink this bottle of cement-cleaning acid. Warning! The hot coffee is hot. Warning! Everything you see, touch, taste, small, or feel might contribute to your death.

I have quoted these words from Mark Twain many times: I quote them again in answer to the soon-to-be-ousted Surgeon General who wants to put Warning! labels on anything that contains alcohol.

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

Some read that as an excuse for indulgence and gluttony, which it assuredly is not. The idea of moderation is built into it. Twain was complaining of the Longhouse, of scolds, or busybodies, of the pinch-face shrews who got our very Constitution amended to ban alcohol.

Funny that happened a Century ago. Plenty of time for people to have forgotten the madness of it. And to try it again.

Before we get to the report, it’s well to remember that nobody drinks “alcohol”. We drink beer, we enjoy wine, we sip the very water of life. It is also true that everybody alive, and even exceptions like Joe Biden, knows that drunkenness is bad. There is no reason in the world to “raise awareness” or to warn about excessive drinking which is already known and acknowledged by every living, and even every undead, soul.

The Surgeon’s General report didn’t have much direct evidence about “alcohol”, and instead pointed to papers which were supposed to have that evidence. The first touted reference was to “Proportion and number of cancer cases and deaths attributable to potentially modifiable risk factors in the United States, 2019” by Islami and others in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Only that paper didn’t have anything direct, either, pointing to still other papers. There were a sparsity of those, too, in alcohol-cancer ties.

The first reference to alcohol-cancer I could find was to “Proportion of cancer cases and deaths attributable to alcohol consumption by US state, 2013-2016” by Sauer and others in Cancer Epidemiology. Finally, I thought, we’re getting somewhere. But where?

The Methods say they looked at a survey which asked people how much they drank and whether they had cancer. But they converted everything into one “risk” number, and we never learn how much drinking is “linked” to cancer; instead they implied that any drinking is bad. They also use direst causal language in their conclusion about their correlational model and say this-and-such number of cancers were because of drinking. A no no.

Now no one would, or should, be surprised to learn that drunks contract liver or esophageal cancer, but it does not follow that therefore the sober are “at risk” because of modest drinking. Yet the attitude is the opposite. Take the doctor on Twitter who repeatedly chirped “No amount of alcohol is safe.”

Or take the Surgeon General himself (I am assuming his pronouns, a dicey move under his watch). He says “scientific evidence demonstrates a causal relationship between alcohol use and increased risk for at least seven different types of cancer”. And that the “risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day”. Or fewer? See the way he implies any amount is “unsafe”?

That attitude is found among Experts. Look at this very carefully titled peer-reviewed Lancet paper “No level of alcohol consumption improves health” by Robyn Burton and Nick Sheron. Think about that title before reading more. This is one of the main papers in that journal’s Global Burden of Disease project.

They say (my emphasis):

The conclusions of the study are clear and unambiguous: alcohol is a colossal global health issue and small reductions in health-related harms at low levels of alcohol intake are outweighed by the increased risk of other health-related harms, including cancer.

A curmudgeonly diffident petulant not-so-scientific way to say low levels of alcohol are good for you.

Another paper the Surgeon General mentions is “Alcohol consumption and site-specific cancer risk: a comprehensive dose–response meta-analysis” by Bagnardi and others in British Journal of Cancer. (Thanks to Paul Fischer for digging this up.)

They open saying “Alcohol is a risk factor for cancer” of various kinds. But their main findings are (again my emphasis) “Relative risks (RRs) for heavy drinkers compared with nondrinkers and occasional drinkers were 5.13 for oral and pharyngeal cancer” and etc. etc. for other cancers. So again not all alcohol is bad for you.

All this is besides the voluminous evidence proving modest amounts of wine are good for you. Christopher Snowden is particularly good on this.

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12 Comments

  1. SHAWN E MARSHALL

    What have these experts been drinking or smoking? The totalitarian impulse runs strong among intellectuals until the worst sorts of people come to power (credit Hayek) and they are eliminated; having done their worst they are now expendable.

  2. trigger warning

    My personal favorite, seen in the User’s Guide for a steam iron:

    “Do not iron clothes while wearing”

  3. bruce g charlton

    What you say is true – but is another aspect to alcohol; which is that some races (and some regions) are not able to drink moderately – but nearly always binge drink, perhaps to the point of oblivion.

    Examples include those who were recently hunter gatherers – such as Australian Aborigines, and some American Indians. But there is even a gradient from South to North within Europe and Scandinavia – where the prevalence of bingeing gets much greater the further North. This can be seen between the USA (not much bingeing) and the much more northerly Britain; and even within Britain. Where I live (Newcastle upon Tyne) has a pretty extreme binge drinking – but Scotland is more extreme.

    I think this probably relates to how many ancestral generations have been exposed to alcohol. It seems that when a human population is exposed to alcohol and has easy access; there is probably a significant die-off of those who cannot be moderate. Natural selection.

    So that the parts of the world where alcohol was most anciently discovered (North Africa and Mediterranean) have evolved the ability to drink moderately even when they drink a lot per year. I’ve spent some months in Spain over the years; but I’ve never seen a Spaniard intoxicated in the way that is normal in Newcastle or Glasgow; although Spaniards sometimes have a brandy for breakfast. In contrast, Scandinavians that drank on average very little alcohol per year, were/are very prone to binge drinking.

    The take home message is probably that proneness to bingeing is a heritable trait, and different places and peoples probably need different policies and laws wrt alcoholic drinks. e.g. US Indian tribes and Aborigine elders are aware of this special vulnerability, and often try to enforce prohibition in and around their reservations.

    (Within the USA among the European descended people, the places and people most prone to binge drinking seem to inherit this trait; e.g. Appalachians – who ancestrally came from the North of England and Scotland: and the Irish who are also bingers on their home turf.)

    Labelling probably has no significant effect. Levels of average annual alcohol consumption are effect by price, i.e. taxation – higher taxes leads to lower consumption, until tax get too high and illegal alcohol takes over. Binge drinking is mainly influenced by availability of alcohol – eg (as in Sweden or Iceland – population prone to bingeing) having few places licensed to sell alcoholic drinks, with short opening hours.

  4. William Wallace

    I remember when we first experienced the big crack down on drunk driving in the early 80s and it was met by resistance. The modern prohibitionists took the “common sense” regulatory road and they claimed to just want to get the dangerous drunks off the streets. The ones who were swerving all over and about to pass out drunks. Bar owners and patrons warned of the slippery slope and that they would eventually come after anyone who had a single beer. The prohibitionists won that round and every one since. Eventually sobriety check points appeared. Restrictions on BAC were lowered. No amount of drinking was safe. Now finally they admit that no drinking was the goal all along. Buzzed Driving is Drink Driving and we all must be sober. Even fatigued driving has become drunk driving. Don’t worry, the new goal is no human driving. AI will do your driving for you. Inability to obtain sky high insurance will assure that you won’t drive while the algorithm will determine that your belief system requires a high speed turn into the concrete bridge abutment.

  5. Uncle Mike

    The Sturgeon General (among others) needs a warning label plastered on his forehead: Warning — Politicians Are Deadly To Children And Other Living Things

    But it won’t do any good. Darwin always wins in the end. Despite all the Karens in the longhouse.

  6. Brian (bulaoren)

    A couple of days ago, I found myself in a “some assembly required” situation, and needed to buy a phillips screwdriver. On the packaging for that screwdriver, I found the following; “WARNING: Cancer and Reproductive Harm-www P65Warnings.ca.gov.” And, did I mention Screwdriver?

  7. Johnno

    This all either a clever way for THE SCIENCE ™ to try and artificially create a public interest for further studies, therefore securing future long term funding from the government with the additional benefit of unlimited free drinks for science… and they are THE SCIENCE ™!

    Or a long term devilish strategy to take advantage of the current crop of Catholic Bishops’ guilability in order to suppress the inclusion of wine at the Mass… for safety… and also, invalidity, but when has that stopped them? After all, the present vineyard is rotten enough that women are increasingly being put in charge, and women love to read the ingredient and warning labels.

    The time is right to burn what little remains of the harvest!

  8. George the Baptist

    Mark Twain was a child molestor so who cares what he said. Dinking alchohol is a sin and we should kick all Hews and Catholics and Lutherans out of the country and bring back prohibition.

  9. Cary Cotterman

    Most people over the age of about sixteen consume alcoholic beverages to some degree. It follows that most people who have cancer have consumed alcoholic beverages. Voila!

  10. Michael 2

    “Buzzed Driving is Drink Driving and we all must be sober.”
    Well there’s a novel idea; everyone driving around in a 4000 pound battering ram ought to be perfectly sober. Not just sober, but alert, attentive and law-abiding or at least you stay on your side of the road and I’ll stay on my side.

    “Most people over the age of about sixteen consume alcoholic beverages to some degree”
    Well, measured in grams I suppose that some cough syrup counts and if you inadvertently swallow some Listerine, well, that’s alcohol.

    “The Sturgeon General”
    Is swimming in the Columbia River.

  11. Beans

    How many times can we find the Surgeon General and the FDA wrong before we stop listening to them?

    Let’s see how many times the ‘experts’ have been wrong.

    Eggs are actually good for you.
    Animal fats are actually better than vegetable oils.
    Animal milks are actually better than ‘Nut’ or ‘Grain’ milks.
    The Food Pyramid is upside down as meat and dairy are really good for you.
    Very moderate intake of nicotine is actually good for many people as it is a calming agent (it’s the fine particulates in the smoke that really are the threat, same with fine sawdust, coal dust, metal dust, flour (yes, flour. Baker’s Lung used to be a real thing.))

    That’s the top ones, but there are others. And most of the ‘errors’ can be linked to studies funded by the very organizations that are pushing whatever agenda is being pushed.

  12. Tars Tarkas

    In my opinion, 2-3 drinks per day is way beyond light or moderate drinking. IMHO, anyone who drinks literally every day is a problem drinker or soon will be.

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