As usual I am late with this one but I wanted to give the good old BBC plenty of time to mention it. As far as I can tell, however, they seem to have ignored it. So, back to the recent item Now They’ve Got It In For My Wine. Anyone watching the BBC news broadcasts regarding the report that so many of us are drinking too much will have noticed that they really went to town. Big splash, dire warnings, catchy headlines, end of the world stuff.

So it seems rather sad to me that the follow up news story seems to have been ignored. But you can read it at Times Online headlined: How ‘safe drinking’ experts let a bottle or two go to their heads.

In a nutshell, the claims that we were all falling into alcoholism and about to die of liver disease was based on the recommended maximum daily alcohol units published by the Royal College of Surgeons back in 1987. These recommendations have been used by health professionals everywhere since then and were the measure for last weeks scare report. The problem, now exposed, is that the levels they cast in stone 20 years ago were absolutely meaningless.

Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the college’s working party on alcohol, told The Times yesterday that the figures were not based on any clear evidence. He remembers “rather vividly” what happened when the discussion came round to whether the group should recommend safe limits for men and women.

“David Barker was the epidemiologist on the committee and his line was that ‘We don’t really have any decent data whatsoever. It’s impossible to say what’s safe and what isn’t’.

“And other people said, ‘Well, that’s not much use. If somebody comes to see you and says ‘What can I safely drink?’, you can’t say ‘Well, we’ve no evidence. Come back in 20 years and we’ll let you know’. So the feeling was that we ought to come up with something. So those limits were really plucked out of the air. They weren’t really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee.”

In other words – it was a complete and utter lie and a worthless recommendation. Time, methinks, to get the corkscrew out.