The scientists accused of using ‘flawed’ research to tell you to stop drinking

alcohol
alcohol

There is no safe level of alcohol. A single drink a day could shave almost three months off your life. And drinking can boost your cancer risk by 23 per cent.

These are the findings of a controversial British scientist whose headline-grabbing research is influencing government policy and drinkers around the world.

Dr Tim Stockwell’s work – which has been published in The Lancet, among other esteemed organs – has inspired a new crackdown on alcohol that has seen daily drinking guidelines slashed in Canada and Australia. The US may next year follow suit, and the UK anti-alcohol lobby is using Dr Stockwell’s work as it warms up for a similar fight.

But many of Dr Stockwell’s respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research. They question his motives and accuse him of being a front for a worldwide temperance lobby that is secretly attempting to ban alcohol.

Dr Stockwell denies this. Speaking to The Telegraph, he in turn accused his detractors of being funded by the alcohol lobby and said his links to temperance societies were fleeting. He was the president of the Kettil Bruun Society (a think tank with links to an organisation born out of what was the international temperance congresses) and he has been reimbursed for addressing temperance movements and admits attending their meetings, but, he says, not as a member.

A crowd lines the street during a temperance March circa 1906
A crowd lines the street during a temperance march circa 1906 - Science & Society Picture Library

The anti-alcohol furrow Dr Stockwell is ploughing is not a lonely one: scientists he has collaborated with on research highlighting the dangers of alcohol are in positions of power at major institutions, such as the World Health Organisation; three are currently on the six-person panel that will decide if US drinking guidelines will be reduced.

They are overhauling decades-worth of scientific evidence – and newspaper headlines – that backed the health benefits of alcohol, or what is known in the scientific community as the J-curve. The J-curve is the theory that, like a capital J, the negative health consequences of drinking dip slightly into positive territory with moderate drinking – as it benefits such things as the heart – before rising sharply back into negative territory the more someone drinks.

Dr Stockwell, who was director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research from 2004 to 2020, began publicly courting controversy last year when he was a key member of a panel that slashed Canada’s recommended weekly allowance from 10 drinks for women and 15 drinks for men to two drinks for each sex.

But his most recent intervention might be his most controversial yet: a study that found there was no safe level of alcohol intake. The research was widely reported without a hint of the row it had triggered in the scientific community. In common with other news outlets, The Daily Mail stated baldly that the longstanding belief that one or two drinks a day is good for you was based on “flawed” scientific research.

However, it was the final straw for many fellow academics and experts who told The Telegraph they read the report in disbelief, concluding it was yet another example of Dr Stockwell “cherry picking” the evidence to suit his agenda.

Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told The Telegraph that Dr Stockwell had wrongly taken a correlation to be causal.

“Dr Stockwell’s research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations,” Dr Harding said. “You record people’s lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it’s just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own.

“And in this particular case, Dr Stockwell selected six studies out of 107 to focus on. You could say he cherry picked them.

“Really, the important thing is not the epidemiology, it’s the effect that alcohol actually has on the body. We know the reasons why the curve is J-shaped; it’s because of the protective effect moderate consumption has on heart disease and a number of other diseases.”

Dr. Tim Stockwell photographed in Victoria, British Columbia
British scientist Tim Stockwell has been accused of cherry picking evidence to fit his own agenda, which he denies - Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star

Dr Stockwell rejects Dr Harding’s criticism of his study, telling The Telegraph that Dr Harding “doesn’t appear to have read it” and accusing him of being in the pocket of the alcohol industry.

“We identified six high-quality studies out of 107 and they didn’t find any J-shaped curve,” Dr Stockwell said“In fact, since our recent paper, we’ve now got genetic studies which are showing there’s no benefits of low-level alcohol use.

“I personally think there might still be small benefits, but the point of our work is that, if there are benefits, they’ve been exaggerating them.”

Taking aim at Dr Harding, he accused him of being an “industry-funded person” who has “made a living from putting a good spin on the relationship between alcohol and health”. Dr Harding denied being “funded by anyone”. Dr Stockwell in turn brushed off the claim that he himself is compromised through his links to the temperance lobby.

“I have attended a meeting funded by the Swedish Temperance Organisation and I’ve written material that they have published,” he said. “I’ve had connections with the International Order of Good Templars. I’ve attended some of their meetings, but I’m not a member.”

On a practical level, drinkers will almost certainly be unaware of the explosive row Dr Stockwell’s research has generated in academia. But there is a very high chance they will have read one of the many stories his work has generated, and potentially modified their behaviour, reluctantly popping the cork back into the wine bottle or leaving the beer unbought on the supermarket shelf.

Now experts warn that the anti-drinking lobby – a “neo-temperance movement” – has the US and UK’s drinking guidelines in its sights.

“Dr Stockwell has never conducted any primary research into this as far as I’m aware,” Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, told The Telegraph. “He just keeps creating systematic reviews with the aim of trying to obscure the J-curve and the benefits of drinking.

“You have what I think you can fairly describe as a neo-temperance movement operating quite effectively in Britain and around the world.

“A lot of these academics take the view that everybody needs to drink less. They’re very keen on being able to say there’s no safe level because then they could treat alcohol very similar to tobacco. Both these things are addictive, both cause cancer.

“I think they’re playing quite a long game and they’re having to deny a lot of pretty credible science to do it. I think that they think it’s a noble lie to say there is no safe level. What harm can it do if people are discouraged from drinking?”

He added that the UK guidelines, which were last updated in 2016 to no more than 14 units a week for men and women, are in the crosshairs and that, “Gradually over time, they want to bring these guidelines down to zero.”

Last week, the Institute of Alcohol Studies, formerly the UK Temperance Alliance, said groups with links to the alcohol industry should be “treated in a similar way to the tobacco industry” as the think tank pushed for tighter restrictions on alcohol policy.

Ghost sign on the former the Temperance Building Society building, Alton Road, Richmond, TW9, London, England, UK
A ghost sign of the Temperance Building Society building, Alton Road, Richmond, London - Alamy Stock Photo

Dr Snowdon pointed out that Dr Tim Naimi – a longtime collaborator with Dr Stockwell, who replaced him as director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research – has also had to declare links to the International Order of Good Templars, also known as Movendi International. Dr Naimi was reimbursed for addressing the temperance group and took part in their podcast. Dr Naimi is currently on the US panel that will decide if US guidelines need to be cut. He declined to talk to The Telegraph.

Dr Dan Malleck, an alcohol policy specialist at Brock University in Ontario, told The Telegraph: “It’s like when they asked Willie Dunn, the bank robber, why he robbed banks, and he said ‘Because that’s where the money is’.

“Well, why do you look at alcohol harm? Because it’s where the money is. But it’s not a self-enriching thing. Most of the money is government funding, and governments are more concerned about protecting their people than about encouraging them to enjoy themselves. So people like Stockwell and Naimi have been doubling down on the harms research because that’s where the money is.”

But the focus on reducing harm is to miss many of the unquantifiable benefits of drinking, Dr Malleck added.

“Mild, moderate drinking loosens people up, creates social bonds, creates benefits, boosts creativity [and] innovation, as well as just encouraging relaxation,” he said. “The only thing you can measure is stuff like death, violence, accidents, injuries. It’s really hard to measure non-accidents or non-injuries.

“I use this image from a French film in the Fifties where two guys are standing outside of St. Paul’s in London, and one says to the other, ‘Don’t kill yourself, let’s go have a drink’. It’s this notion that drinking is part of this social connection we have with people, but you can’t measure when someone didn’t hurt themselves because a friend invited them for a drink.”

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