Christopher Snowden illustrates some of the deliberate lies promulgated by the World Health Organization’s anti-alcohol activists:
The incompetent and corrupt World Health Organisation has produced a “guide for journalists” to help hacks report on issues related to alcohol accurately. Not entirely unpredictably, it is a catalogue of anti-drinking tropes, half-truths and brazen lies. The very first words are “No amount of alcohol is safe to drink” and it doesn’t get any better thereafter.
The health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption really stick in the craw of the neo-temperance lobby and so that is where the WHO starts:
Isn’t drinking some alcohol good for your health?
No, there is no evidence for the common belief that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts can help people live longer by decreasing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or other conditions.
No evidence?! Even a casual follower of the science knows that there is at least some evidence. Those who are more familiar with the literature know that there is a huge amount of evidence built up over decades, tested and re-examined from every angle precisely because so many people in ‘public health’ don’t want to believe it.
It is inaccurate to say that “experts are divided” on whether there is no amount of healthy alcohol drinking. The scientific consensus is that any level of alcohol consumption, regardless of the amount, increases risks to health.
This is just a lie. That is not the consensus, and the only reason there isn’t unanimous agreement that moderate drinking is beneficial to health is that anti-alcohol academics such as Tim Stockwell have made it their life’s work to cast doubt on the evidence.
While several past studies did suggest that moderate consumption could, on average, promote health benefits …
Note that this immediately contradicts the claim that there is no evidence.
… newer research (1) shows that those studies used limited methodologies and that many of them were funded by the alcohol industry (2).
The first reference is a short commentary by some WHO staffers which doesn’t discuss methodologies at all. The second reference is a study which found that only 5.4 per cent of research papers in this area were funded by the alcohol industry and concluded that “the association between moderate alcohol consumption and different health outcomes does not seem to be related to funding source.”
The WHO must hold journalists in low esteem if it thinks they won’t check up the citations like this.
The dicussion [sic] about possible so-called protective effects of alcohol diverts attention from the bigger picture of alcohol harm; for example, even though it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries (3).
The “bigger picture” is overall mortality. When all the risks are taken into account, including the small risks from a few rare cancers, do moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers? Yes. Yes, they do.
