Saturday, April 01, 2006

TALES OF MISLEADING HEADLINES

Today friends I want to take you into a TALE OF MISLEADING HEADLINES and this one today is a winner. While what the headline says is TECHNICALLY accurate it does mislead. So lets go over to Al-Reuters land and see this story

Light drinking may not be good for you: study


Wow I thought, all these other studies are wrong..... Welllllllllll not so fast.

But a team at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the University of California San Francisco analyzed 54 studies and found that only seven of them differentiated between people who abstain from choice and those who may have quit drinking for health reasons.

When such studies show a higher death rate for abstainers than for moderate drinkers, it may be because of the poor health of some abstainers who recently quit drinking and not because alcohol is good for health, they said.


They didn't do a study as the article maintained nor did they rebut the point of the study (light drinking is healthful) they pointed out a flaw in the methodology of most of the studies... that sure is different then saying light drinking may not be good for you now isn't it.

the sputtering goes on

In the seven studies that included people who have not drunk alcohol for a long time, by choice, there was no difference in rates of heart disease between drinkers and non-drinkers.


Well now I am not so sure that makes the best control group either. It gets into the quality of abstention and the quality of the drinking.

"We know that older people who are light drinkers are usually healthier than their non-drinking peers," said Kaye Fillmore of the UCSF School of Nursing. "Our research suggests light drinking is a sign of good health, not necessarily its cause. Many people reduce their drinking as they get older for a variety of health reasons."


We also know that drinking alters how the body metabolizes cholestoral which is something which impairs health.

So sounds like this "study" was equally flawed as the methodology problem it saw in other studies

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