Here’s looking at you, data.
There are only so many times a person can be jerked around before rising up and shouting, “Enough!” Let’s see. Not that long ago, a glass of red wine was deemed helpful to the heart — but not the colon. Or is it that it helps the brain, but not the breast? Or is it red wine only, never white wine? Or is it moderate drinking, no heavy drinking? (Forget the liver — we all know about that.)
Women, “some researchers at Oxford” say you can forget about having even one glass of wine. That glass puts you at a dramatically increased rate for cancer of just about everything.
Having first read this news in an editorial in this morning’s Times (my daily paper, but one I take with a grain of wine — especially since the Judith Miller fiasco), I immediately remembered my 11th-grade math teacher’s words of wisdom: Statistics are a form of lie. I decided to leave my bottle of Sancerre chilling in the fridge while I checked out this miserable new bit of information.
Googling the words, “wine women epidemiology study Oxford” led me to the headline, dated today, from a UK publication: “A large glass of wine a day raises cancer risk by a quarter, women are warned.” According to Dr. Naomi Allen, who’s part of Oxford’s cancer-epidemiology unit, and headed the study that eventually resulted in my day starting out so poorly, “These findings suggest that even relatively low levels of drinking — about one or two alcoholic drinks every day — increase a woman’s risk of developing cancer of the breast, liver and rectum.” I should have known. Life’s never fair, and nothing so civilized, so lovely, so beautiful as drinking a glass of wine could be good for you. It had to be that it leads to Cancer of the Everything.
The study was recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, in the UK, funded by something called Cancer Research UK. These are serious-sounding publications and institutions (I don’t know about you, but the mere mention of “Oxford” always intimidates me). A certain Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians (that sounds good, too — the Queen is behind this!), soberly summed things up: “This study will be deeply disturbing to many women who drink regularly.” No kidding.
One sentence in the article got me thinking on my own, however. (This is hard to do when you’re facing statistics — especially grim ones.) Dr. Allen is quoted saying it “had not been possible to estimate the risk for a teetotaler [I’ve changed the spelling of this word to that which we use in the States], because the data did not show whether a woman had never drunk or had stopped for a time.”
Let me get this straight. We have a Times editorial sure to ruin the day for millions of women based on a study whose results came without any data to compare them to. Control group, anyone?
David Hume said that nothing was more subject to fashion than the pretended decisions of science. I think I’ll wait before chucking that bottle of Sancerre. In fact, I think I’ll open it tonight and pour two nice big glasses—one for me and one for my daughter.
(Photo by Flickr user paulaloe)