32 BBC SCIENCE FOCUS MAGAZINE COLLECTION
DIETthere would really be any lasting benefits if I
kept it up. Is alcohol, at the relatively modest
levels t hat I’ve been d r in k ing it for t he last few
years, really that bad?
According to the Department of Health if
you’re drinking 14 units of alcohol a week,
let alone the 20 units that I was averaging,
then you’re increasing your chance of dying
by around one per cent. That figure sounds
quite scary, but Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton
Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk,
at Cambridge University, has crunched the
numbers and put some context on the one per
cent chance of dying claim.
“An hour of TV watching a day, or eating
a bacon sandwich a couple of times a week,
is more dangerous to your long-term health,”
he says. “It all seems to come down to what
pleasure you get from moderate drinking.”
So not that scary after all. But what about
the claim that moderate drinking is worse for
you than total abstention and that “there is no
justification for drinking for health reasons”.
This is certainly the view of Prof Tim Stockwell,
director of the Centre for Addiction Research
at the University of Victoria in Canada. He
has advised many governments, including our
own, on alcohol guidelines and thinks there
are no biochemical benefits to drinking. He
does concede, however, t hat moderate d r i n k i ng“There would be 10 per cent
fewer deaths from breast
cancer worldwide if there
was no drinking”
5 While this isn’t a huge amount, it
is well over the current government
guidelines of 14 units a week for men
and women. The guidelines used to
be 21 units a week for men, 14 for
women, but they were changed in
December 2016, when the Department
of Health announced that, “there
is no justification for drinking for
health reasons”.
I was surprised and somewhat
sceptical about the definitive nature
of this statement for reasons I will
come to in a moment, but it did
give me further reasons to attempt
an alcohol-free November. I went
off and got some blood samples
taken, to measure fasting glucose,
liver enzymes and my cholesterol
levels, and I also weighed myself and
measured my blood pressure. I put the bottles
of wine out of sight and I was good to go.BREAKING THE HABIT
The first couple of weeks were challenging,
because I had got into the habit of having a
drink with my evening meal and I did miss
it. I thought the best way to get through the
month was to tell people what I was doing
so it would be too embarrassing to backtrack.
My friends were understanding and it also
meant that when we met for a drink I was
no longer tempted to eat crisps at the bar.
I found that I was better company when I went
out in the evening because I was less likely to
have a postprandial slump. I did not, however,
notice much improvement in my sleep or any
impressive changes in my skin.
It seemed that there were good reasons to
stick to Dry November, but I wondered whetherSCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY