I am annoyed.
I am not throwing a little fit because the press, the government, or another pillar of society have--yet again--attacked my wine drinking habits. I do not know anyone working for the government; I don't know anyone employed by the Daily Telegraph; and I'm sure that they don't know me. So I'm not taking this personally.
Also, I am not female, which, were I to follow the faulty logic lurking underneath the headlines, at least for the moment leaves me quite safe.
But I am quite thoroughly peeved at the negligent, sloppy thinking of opinion formers who should know better. Especially when they use the pillar of their carelessness to flourish attention-grabbing headlines.
What am I on about?
A recent newsflash from Decanter magazine cautions that "just one small glass of wine a day increases a woman's risk of developing a range of cancers", citing a spanking new Oxford University study, and quoting from the Daily Telegraph, for some reason—see Wine, the World and You.
Not content to leave the news as it is —or, more worryingly, unable to tell the difference— The Daily Telegraph catapults its readers several steps further down the garden path: "Drinking alcohol causes around 13 per cent of a range of cancers in women," it proclaims at the very top of its analysis of the Oxford study (emphasis mine).
Causes, my ass!
Correlation is not causation
If your arthritic neighbour almost always gets a funny pain in the knee a few hours before it starts raining, most people would look at you rather oddly if you were to suggest that the comings and goings of his knee causes it to rain. Indeed, it may be that something to do with the rain causes the pain in his knee--or just that he tends to notice it more before the rain because it makes for a good story.
And a good story it is! You can bet your life that the slipshod leap from correlation to causation in the Telegraph article will be enthusiastically re-enacted in most of the coverage this research will get on the Web and in the media. Particularly where it suits the agenda of those who delight in prescribing their likes, dislikes and private demons to the rest of the population.
There! You see: Cancer! Even one little glass. Of wine. Don't you come telling me that wine should be treated differently from the hard stuff! I can imagine the anti-wine lobby in France drooling all over their little bibs in glee.
Wine is not an innocent pleasure, I'd be the first to agree. I've never had much patience with the opportunists who tried to get on the bandwagon to sue the tobacco giants, protesting their innocent surprise at the horrid thought that their cigarettes were killing them. Of course alcohol is a poison. The livers of those who succumb to alcoholism don't go cirrhotic, killing their owners, just because they can't think of anything else to do with themselves. Livers give up because they've just had enough of trying to rid your system of the poison you've deliberately been ingesting.
But there is a world of difference between inhaling smoke and drinking wine. Or between enjoying wine and drinking to get drunk. And the mere thought that some dogmatic puritan somewhere is going to try and pull a smoke and mirrors trick, to establish the equivalence of wine with other blatant intoxicants, gets me angry enough to subtract as many years from my life as a daily glass or two of wine might.
Just might. But I'd bet the other way. For let's be honest: that is all that one can hope to achieve with correlative studies: attaining more—or less—solid ground for hedging once's bets.
Even leaving aesthetic considerations aside, wine is not alcohol. There are a veritable cocktail of ingredients in your glass that point in the opposite direction to alcohol, so far as their likely impact on your health is concerned.
I have a lot more faith in the benefit to my health of the combined effect of all that is good in wine, than I would have fear of the spectres conjured up in sensationalising the detrimental impact of any one of its ingredients.
Not everyone mainlines the raw stuff.
