ROSEMARY Goring ("When it comes to alcohol, give it to me straight", The Herald, September 12) highlights the latest NHS England desire for middle-aged drinkers to have two alcohol-free days a week. It is not clear if it is consecutive days or not. Like all recent health advice on alcohol it is full of contradictions and lacks any credibility – so the public continue to ignore it as they await the next announcement.
Yes, older alcohol drinkers, are now affluent enough to imbibe more than in the past. But is that really such a bad or dangerous thing? We need to see and understand the science behind this if any of us are to take it seriously.
Over the last 50 years alcohol, the most commonly-used drug, has steadily increased in popularity and so have the health problems associated with excessive use. The constant changes to the advice on alcohol consumption has spanned quite a spectrum. From 50 or more units per week in the middle of last century, down to 14 units for women and 21 for men in the 1970s. Then revised to three units a day for women and four for men in the 1990s, which was interpreted by the drinkers as weekly units of 21 for women and 28 for men. It is now revised again to 14 units for men and women.
Adults need to know what the science of it is. We know that the liver of a fully-grown average adult eliminates one unit of alcohol an hour. So if you drink the recommended two units a day your liver can rest for the next 22 hours. So how much better will your liver be if you rest it from alcohol for 48 hours? In addition, it has been suggested that such moderate consumption as 14 units a week for most of us has mental health bonuses as it relaxes us from stressed-out lives.
There is of course a very serious problem for those who binge drink on 20, 30, 40 units or more at a time or even daily. That is about an addiction and very often undiagnosed mental health problems caused by self-medicating on alcohol. On the one hand governments are happy to pull in massive revenues from alcohol, £3 in every £4 in the case of whisky. But they spend very little of that on treatment services for problem drinkers of any age. The new Scottish Government policy of minimum pricing for alcohol is raking in loads of money, £120 million in profit to the industry but not in tax or revenue from alcohol duty.
We really do need to get some clarity on just how dangerous the drug alcohol really is. Only then will anyone, including the older and wiser pensioner population, either give up on alcohol or moderate their drinking even more.
One serious deficiency in the years of health promotion that I have witnessed and been part of, is that only the negative aspects of all drug use is highlighted in health promotion messages. These messages are resisted by the public because in their experience their use of their drug of choice has for them some positive affects on their lives.
Max Cruickshank,
117 Ascot Court, Glasgow.
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