Oh Canada... Two Drinks a Week?!? Really?

"While "dry January" has been a headline trend for a while now, the Canadian Centre on Substance use and Addiction (CCSA) would like the entire calendar year to get a lot more arid."

The latest nanny state edict from Canada insists that if you have more than two drinks a week you are endangering your health. This from a country that has a thriving (albeit state-controlled) wine industry! Naturally this new “guideline” has attracted a lot of press. Should you be worried? Should you take any of it seriously? This excellent article in the National Post takes a shall we say more sober look at the quoted research and comes away with a very different conclusion.

Here's a link:

The gist of the story is that the research was heavily cherry-picked, and most of the 6000 studies supposedly referenced were thrown out of the final data used. Beyond that it’s a matter of how you manipulate statistics. As the article notes, “the CCSA also expresses increases in risk related to alcohol in percentages, which can be overly alarming, if not misleading without further context. For example if your risk of dying from a disease is 0.2:100,000 (or 0.0002 per cent), and drinking three drinks a day increases that by 100 per cent, you now have a 0.0004 per cent chance of dying from that disease.”

Of course we all must make our own decisions as far as drinking is concerned. As for me, I’ll take my chances and avoid this blatant Neo-con fear mongering. –PaulG