Recommended drink limits

In my view CAMRA should be much more vocal in combating all the anti-drink nonsense we see bandied about nowadays. How many pubs would survive if nobody ever drank more than ten pints a week?

In article , KeithS writes

Er, yes.

You know how it goes:

Civil servant: Why thank you Professor, your exacting report is quite forthright; in fact most courageously so.

Professor: Er, courageous, I am not sure that I follow you.

Civil servant: Well, telling people it is perfectly safe to drink and there will be no unforeseeable consequences in twenty or thirty years.

Professor: Oh, I see; of course it is only a preliminary draft report.

I have no idea how young you are PeterE but /please/ remember that CAMRA is about promoting good beer not skinfulls of alcohol.

I agree with you that the anti-alcohol brigade are getting out of hand. And I agree with you that CAMRA ought to promote the VERY REAL benefits of good pubs. Let me list some:

• A place to escape to

• A place to engage with your local community

• A place to enjoy (and criticise - you've paid a small fortune for the privilege) beer

• A place without threats

• A place where people can say what they think about you to your face... how else will you 'improve' or think of good reasons why you are like you are?

• A place to welcome strangers ... and learn how to make friends

• A place where you can be 'known' as however you present yourself

• A place to enjoy team activities from cheese night, to darts, to charity events

• A place to find out the local gossip

There are some good pubs without good beer. The ones I know personally have been taken over by GK but the sense of community overcomes the overpriced effluent from Bury St. Eds. (And I know the CAMRA story behind that rolling over as well.[1])

By all means get angry. By all means try and do something that makes a difference. (That means *YOU*). By all means find what's good and promote it. And then promote it some more. And polish your diplomacy skills - encouragement backed with -knowledge_ goes a long way. But _Don't fall into the CAMRA=piss-heads trap._

As a postscript: (1) Go and look at the drink driving stats carefully: How many lives would be saved by reducing the limit? The majority are well over the limit and that's 1/7th of those killed by tiredness - Yes really. OK nobody wants to hurt anybody but if somebody can't go to the pub they would drink TWICE as much as home without any peer pressure, without enjoyment and without restraint. ALCOHOLISM IS A DEADLY AND LIFE-WRECKING DRUG ADDICTION.

(2) The time of night I leave pubs at night I don't want to meet drunks, but the issue is the self discipline of stopping after two pints ALWAYS and going gently, not "you shouldn't drive if you've had a pint".[2] You shouldn't drive if you're a twit in the first place or the twit that doesn't give a damn for any limit.

Well done to you PeterE for getting me to nail my colours to the mast. I hope you can see why I'm so keen that people (on my side as it were) don't fall into ways of sloppiness... ... that's exactly what the numpty-durbrains on the other side are doing!

[1]For late readers I was thrown out of CAMRA 10 years ago for standing up against feeble idiots... ... A badge of honour most people in and out of CAMRA acknowledge. And now, locally it's happening all over again. [2] I've been breathalysed on three pints of 3.5% five times without a legal problem. (But that's not the real issue, the real issue is (a) not harming others and (b) able to help yourself or others when that is needed. (I live in the country - Traffic lights scare me!)

Entirely agreed. I'm 48, by the way.

I certainly don't. It does concern me that some active CAMRA members seem to devote far too much of their lives to drinking and are probably drinking at genuinely harmful levels. And that some CAMRA events seem to encourage drunkenness rather than appreciation of good beer.

But a government message that condemns what most of us would regard as pretty light, occasional drinking is likely to do major damage to pubs if taken seriously. And without a thriving pub trade there is little future for real ale.

I wholly agree with you on the issue of reducing the drink-drive limit, as I have stated many times in the past on this group.

In message , PeterE writes

So far there' s been no pressing need to combat it, except for showing by example that people can drink regularly and fairly heavily without driving, fighting, widdling all over town or otherwise being seriously antisocial.

BTW, I read in a Register article (which ICBA to look up and quote) that if you calculate the nation's alcohol consumption from drinker surveys you find we only admit to about half the booze Revenue and Customs have collected duty on. This would have important implications for any public policy that *was* based on scientific studies and not on wishful thinking.

Unlike most of the politicians and bureaucrats that pontificate about this, I have actually read the Richard Doll study which provided the basis of the '21 units' advice. Doll was primarily interested in smoking, but as part of a very long term study he asked UK GPs to fill in regular questionnaires about their smoking and drinking habits and any diseases they were experiencing.

As Doll freely admitted, the alcohol statistics were marginal to the study and were difficult to interpret because:

1. GPs in the 60s and 70s who were heavy drinkers were primarily whisky drinkers, one of the most unhealthy ways of getting ethanol into your body;
2. Most people, including GPs, lie about their alcohol consumption, so people reporting drink related illness were probably drinking much more than they were admitting.

The public health establishment is a bit like Greenpeace - 'never let the truth get in the way of a good campaign' - because they see themselves as holding the moral high ground and have a 'the end justifies the means' approach.

You only need to consider the recent ridiculous Department of Health pronouncement that pregnant women should drink *no* alcohol. There is no scientific evidence to support this at all, but the health bureaucrats were concerned that pregnant women would go out and have a skinfull on the Bacardi Breezers unless this message went out.

None of this is meant to suggest that heavy drinking has no health consequences of course.

Paul

Agreed, but how do we define "heavy drinking"?

I've known several people who routintely drank 100+ units a week but still maintained good health, a driving licence and well-paid employment.

Demonising those who drink 22 units a week is ignorant nonsense.

Indeed. It's difficult to demonstrate an unambiguous link between alcohol and illness even in people who drink at alcoholic levels from morning till night.

A regular in my local pub is 92 and in good health. He's enjoyed his beer throughout his adult life and even now drinks 3 pints 5 days a week (30 units).

Paul

We all know these maximum limits and safe levels are nonsense, but beware of the 'bears don't climb trees argument': Only the people who met a bear that didn't climb the tree they were hiding in ever came back to tell the tale.

I went on some sort of course about 15 years ago and met one of the people involved in the "drinking limits" fiction. He told me that they had just sat round a table and come up with figures which would look plausible. Trouble is nobody would believe me ! Until now.............

I think these limits are probably counter productive. I suspect most people can't be persuaded to cut their social drinking, and we probably don't need them to, however we probably do want people to cut down heir heavy drinking. By lumping everyone in together the effect is lessened. I suspect a lot of the underestimation of consumption is because it isn't that easy to work out how many units you have consumed. A lot of the beer/ wine/spirits people drink are not served in correct measures and do not have the average strength. For example units in wine are based on wine of around 10% but most ne world win is 12%. With beer, most people think half a pint is a unit, but the beer they are drinking is considerably stronger than that.

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:56:25 +0100, Bill Hewitt wrote (in message ):

At 3.52% abv it would be.

Defining binge drinking as 6 units is particularly unhelpful and makes typical social drinkers skeptical about all alcohol advice.

Paul

Stella artois (to use one particularly common example) is 1.56 units per half pint. 56% stronger than the rule of thumb!

I read the Doll paper (BMJ, 1974) again today as someone was rabbiting on at work about there being no scientific basis for the 21 units limit.

Without wanting to get into a debate about the validity of the study etc., a couple of points leap out if you take the data at face value.

The "death from all causes" rate (which is what really matters IMHO) vs alcohol consumption curve is a nice "U" shaped curve which minmises around 21 units. So in that case the government would be much better off (NHS costs) if it was compulsory for everyone to drink 21 units/week.

Secondly, I take great comfort from the data that shows that the all causes death rate for 0-unit tee-totallers is almost exactly the same as that for the 63 units/week drinkers :-)

-- JohnB

Do you think we could get these on the NHS?

Move over to French brewed 1664 then. Every few years they reduce the ABV, so the number of units consumed will decrease over time. (The other week in France it was 5.4%, reduced from previous strengths of 5.9 and

6.4.) It's so disgusting that you won't want to drink much of the stuff anyway. :-)

Would you want to drink NHS beer? Let alone NHS scrumpy!