

Guest comment: CDCP buries good news on drinking

• The writer, a resident of Brooklyn, NY, is a contributor to the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, and editor-at-large of, a non-partisan, non-profit project affiliated with George Mason University in Virginia that examines the way statistics and science are used in public policy and the media. He wrote this commentary for




“If you want to lead a longer life and feel better, you should adopt healthy behaviors –- not smoking, getting regular physical activity, eating healthy, and avoiding excessive alcohol use.”


As the number of low-risk lifestyle behaviors increased, the risk of all-cause mortality and mortality from major cardiovascular disease and other causes decreased progressively. Compared with participants with no low-risk lifestyle behaviors, participants with 4 such behaviors were 63% less likely to dies, 66% less likely to die from a malignant neoplasm, 65% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, and 57% less likely to die from other causes.

What happens if you take out moderate drinking? The study (published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Public Health) found that those people who reported one, two or three factors were 25%, 40% and 55% less likely to die (respectively) during the follow up period. Clearly, the contribution of moderate drinking to health was not trivial.

Though there are limitations to the NHANES data (there’s a lot of self-reporting), it’s the best health data we have on the U.S. population, and the findings tally with studies done elsewhere. Four, fairly basic factors, have a huge impact on health.

But it’s that fourth factor, the positive finding on moderate drinking (defined as two drinks for a guy, one for a gal, per day), that appears to be difficult for the CDC to swallow, leading to much throat clearing in the study itself about all the baleful effects of immoderate drinking, and then the evasive language in the CDC press release.

It will also upset those public health mandarins –- notably New York City’s public health commissioner, Thomas Farley -– who attack moderate drinking as being worse than excessive drinking and argue for polices to target moderation (yeah, sounds bizarre –- but there’s a math to the madness, which you can read more about here).



Categories: Commentary
Bill Dowd