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Not that it seems to matter to me; I drink in moderation and like just about every kind of food you can imagine, from tofu and bean sprouts to fettucine Alfredo. Then again, I don’t eat a lot of desserts. Maybe I can tell myself that if I didn’t drink wine and the occasional cocktail, I’d be 50 pounds overweight instead of only 15.

What would be absolutely hilarious is if they did this same survey amongst users of other recreational drugs. The headline could be ‘Study finds LSD consumption reduces the risk of obesity by 80%’

John Coffin there is good reason why the * Anonymous groups are violently opposed to anyone assessing the efficacy of their method. It wouldn’t do for the general public to become aware of their monumental failure rate.

At last, the excuse men need for skiving off down the pub.

Several studies have shown that moderate consumption of alcohol does not lead to weight gain and some have actually show that, in women, those who drink alcohol actually weigh less than those who don’t drink.

For example, Mark F McCarty, writing in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, states that ‘large cross-sectional epidemiologic surveys show that women who are moderate drinkers tend to be much lighter than women who do not drink.’

The British Health Survey, published in 1995, found that women who were moderate drinkers were about half as likely to be obese as non-drinkers.

A study of 138,000 men and women by Harvard University, published in 1991, found that men who drank moderate amounts of wine or beer gained no more weight over the years than men who did not and that women had a body mass index about 15 per cent lower than non-drinkers.

And finally, in one very recent study (published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003) by the Department of Primary Care and Population Science, Royal Free and University College Medical School, London, the authors concluded that ‘there is no evidence that light-to-moderate drinking is associated with weight gain’.

Several short-term diet studies have echoed these findings: people who temporarily added alcohol to their diets usually lost weight.

Those scientists who specialise in the field of alcohol metabolism have known about this relationship between alcohol and weight for over twenty years (and refer to it as ‘the alcohol paradox’, as they have been unable to explain why alcohol does not put on weight). For example, Eric Jéquier of the Institute of Physiology, University of Lausanne, writing in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, stated that ‘the relation between alcohol consumption and body weight remains an enigma for nutritionists’. And John Crouse, medical researcher at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, states: ‘It comes as a shock to see that people who drink more don’t weigh more’.

Sorry about the somewhat ambiguous nature of the references – the above stuff comes from a note I wrote for a friend of mine months ago in which I excluded all unnecessary detail to avoid boring her and I have since lost the original list of references I had.

hey, maybe the Bristol homeopaths have read this advice, they seem to apply it word for word in their “research”!!!

It is also worth noting that I’ve never heard of wet drunk who didn’t consider THEIR drinking a model of moderation. As the old joke goes: ‘How do you know when an alcoholic is lying?…..their lips move.”

The impossibility of extracting valid data from surveys and limited clinical observation (‘gerbils and neutrons don’t lie, people do’) is nicely put in the following citation:

Addiction
Volume 91 Issue 6 Page 779 – June 1996
doi:10.1046/j.1360-0443.1996.9167795.x
How to have a high success rate in treatment: advice for evaluators of alcoholism programs
William R. Miller, Martha Sanchez-Craig
Two seasoned alcohol treatment researchers offer tongue-in-cheek advice to novice program evaluators faced with increasing pressure to show high success rates. Based on published examples, they advise: (1) choose only good prognosis cases to evaluate; (2) keep follow-up periods as short as possible; (3) avoid control and comparison groups; (4) choose measures carefully; (5) focus only on alcohol outcomes; (6) use liberal definitions of success; (7) rely solely upon self-report and (8) always declare victory regardless of findings.

However, it’s not really for us to provide potential reasons. If they want to convince us of a causal argument, they need to present it.

However i was also very fit. 5′ 10″ in height and about 170lb without a single scrap of spare flesh on me, the reason i was able to maintain that? i was in the military and doing a lot of hard physical work. I was on my feet for the whole day, I also swam 2.5km every afternoon after work.

These days i am a more moderat drinker but am also quite a bit heavier, the reason? i took a desk job.

I dare say that if you took a bunch of heavy drinkers and put them through basic training they would lose more weight than a control group of heavy drinkers who just cut out the booze.

my point? i hear you cry…. well why do people keep looking for “causes” for obesity etc when it’s a simple matter of what goes in has to be used or removed or else it accumulates.

Maybe the fat people are all hiding at home, friendless, while the beautiful young things are out socialising in the fashionable bars and clubs?

Isn’t it just as likely that being thin makes people psychologically more likely to drink alcohol

this appears to arise from the “cum hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy (no i’m not a flaky humanities grad, i just spend too much time on Wikipedia – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_implies_causation_%28logical_fallacy%29)

just because non-drinkers seem to be more obese than moderate drinkers, doesn’t mean drinking moderate amounts make you thinner. as Ben said, there could be a common reason or missing link that cause folks not to drink and to be fat at the same time.

oh, and folks, re: the above “i’m think and don’t drink” type stories – nice testemonials, but let’s not forget – the plural of anecdote is not data…!” www.badscience.net/?a=xdforum&xdforum_action=viewthread&xf_id=1&xt_id=8

p.s. when can we buy those T-shirts already…?!

But don’t obese people underestimate what they eat, so it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to think they underestimate what they drink too, particularly as alcohol is recognised as a calorie source.

Can we make a silly argument about otaining a proportion of your calories via alcohol rather than fatty foods, and the impact on weight?

The word ‘teetotaller’ in the article doesn’t reveal how many have given up and how many never drank, as Ben points out. It’s often said that when you give up one addiction, you’re likely to replace it with another. If the replacement is pies, you’ll pork up.

For the record, I don’t drink and I am thin. Yes, I know, I am a freak of nature (the not drinking, not the thin part).