The “no safe level” message has reached Germany

Germany | An organised, well-funded, international opposition to the alcohol industry is having no trouble getting its message across in German media too. The liberal national newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, headlined on 3 November that drinking alcohol is a risk and it is best not to drink at all, accompanied by a photo of several glasses of beer.

The whole point of the interview with Helmut Seitz, a physician specialising in internal medicine and alcohol research at the University of Heidelberg, is to winkle out a recommendation as to how many glasses of beer or wine one can drink per week without any health risks.

The background to the issue is that dietary guidelines on safe levels of alcohol consumption have come under increased attack by the anti-alcohol lobby, a network of academic clusters, national and international health NGOs, as well as groups with links to the temperance movement.

Moderate consumption already poses a risk

Despite insistent questioning by the interviewer, Prof Seitz would not be drawn out. There are no safe levels, and moderate consumption is what individuals take it for. But he conceded that the risk of falling ill (some 200 diseases have been linked to alcohol consumption) depends on one’s underlying medical condition and genetic disposition.

He could have also said that some people are very sensitive to the effects of alcohol to their physical health, mental health or propensity to become dependent, while others are quite resistant. It is just that the medical establishment does not know why.

Ultimately, Prof Seitz’s arguments are common sense. Nothing to get worked up about, the panicky headline notwithstanding. However, the interview is timely and fits a pattern. In the Anglophone media, the issue of “no safe level” is far more topical, which the German journalist must have picked up.

Pushing the narrative

A few days previously, Harry Schuhmacher, editor of the US website Beer Business Daily, observed that “the increasing and seemingly coordinated media attacks against the moderate consumption of alcohol continue apace. Media content eagerly adopting the narrative of “no safe level” along with alarmist titles ‘linking’ alcohol – any amount – to cancer has recently appeared in the New York Times, Today Show, Prevention Magazine, Fox News, The Telegraph, CBS News, EveryDay Health, National Geographic (huh?), and the tech magazine Wired (wut?), just to name a few.”

“The bottom line is that there is so much noise in the data that it is currently impossible to divine which combination of factors are leading to [illness and] morbidity rates,” Mr Schumacher said. That is the reason why the narrative of abstinence, rather than moderation, is being pushed.