Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Sometimes, it seems as if the nation’s public health mandarins are the only responsible adults in a country swarming with perpetual teenagers; and, as with teenagers or children, sometimes the adults can’t risk telling the whole truth.
Thus did Thomas Frieden, the director general of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ever so subtly spin the results of a revealing analysis of the impact of four “low risk” lifestyle behaviors on health last month:
“If you want to lead a longer life and feel better, you should adopt healthy behaviors – not smoking, getting regular physical activity, eating healthy, and avoiding excessive alcohol use.”
So did that mean that moderate drinking actually improved your likelihood of living longer? Yes it did, even though Frieden couldn't quite bring himself to say so. CDC researchers used data from the 2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) to examine the impact of never having smoked, eating a healthy diet, adequate physical exercise, and moderate alcohol consumption on overall mortality and specific disease related mortality. They found that it pays to be good – or in the bloodless terminology of public health, it pays to follow “low-risk lifestyle behaviors:”
As the number of low-risk lifestyle behaviors increased, the risk of all-cause mortality and mortality from major cardiovascular disease and other causes decreased progressively. Compared with participants with no low-risk lifestyle behaviors, participants with 4 such behaviors were 63% less likely to dies, 66% less likely to die from a malignant neoplasm, 65% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, and 57% less likely to die from other causes.
What happens if you take out moderate drinking? The study (published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Public Health) found that those people who reported one, two or three factors were 25 percent, 40 percent and 55 percent less likely to die (respectively) during the follow up period. Clearly, the contribution of moderate drinking to health was not trivial.
Though there are limitations to the NHANES data (there’s a lot of self-reporting), it’s the best health data we have on the U.S. population, and the findings tally with studies done elsewhere. Four, fairly basic factors, have a huge impact on health.
But it’s that fourth factor, the positive finding on moderate drinking (defined as two drinks for a guy, one for a gal, per day), that appears to be difficult for the CDC to swallow, leading to much throat clearing in the study itself about all the baleful effects of immoderate drinking, and then the evasive language in the CDC press release.
It will also upset those public health mandarins – notably New York City’s public health commissioner, Thomas Farley – who attack moderate drinking as being worse than excessive drinking and argue for polices to target moderation (yeah, sounds bizarre – but there’s a math to the madness, which you can read more about here).
At least one journalist was misled by the press release into a bit of righteous fulmination, until, that is, he read the study; but at least he was paying some attention: the CDC findings, released in the dead of August, have barely caused a ripple in the media. A blog post in Time and news pieces in Wine Spectator and the Times of Malta are among the few publications to report the findings - with the latter paper, perhaps given its Mediterranean perspective, headlining the news as, “Study recognizes moderate drinking."
And there’s the irony: the finding on moderate drinking is precisely what makes this study striking, in terms of news; and if the CDC wasn’t so squeamish about saying out straight that moderate drinking was associated with a positive effect on health, it might have captured the kind of public attention this study deserved.
