Hazy

Not at all clear, hazy out there, and right windy, currently SSE at 12mph. Like much of the South this morning, we're under a tornado watch. Didn't get to drive up to Bonifay on Tuesday, so scheduled for early this afternoon, and back before dark, if Jesus don't come and the Creek don't rise.

Friends and relatives on tour in Israel this week and next. Canon to the Ordinary (the Ordinary is a peculiar Episcopal Church term meaning the Diocesan Bishop, the one with authority, unlike other bishops in the diocese who may be on staff, Coadjutor, Suffragans, Assisting, Visiting Bishops) to be here Sunday to brief us on our upcoming transition to a new Rector, almost invariably a stressful Time for a parish. For me as the transitioning priest over the past forty years, it was as much fun as PCS orders those twenty years in the Navy: always exciting, though about the halfway mark I matured into no longer willing to tolerate other people deciding where I would live.  This Time I'm not involved, just watching.

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From this morning's online edition of The Guardian, this article (scroll down) by Adrian Chiles triggered two thoughts, 

One, thirty or so years ago, a parishioner who had come to us from growing up in a Baptist church, telling me his preacher always brought his sermons around to railing against alcohol - whiskey, beer, wine (sometimes a preacher inadvertently tells you his own personal struggles by vehemently preaching against them). Which further reminded me of Mama saying their pastor at East Hill Baptist Church always preached against something - whiskey, smoking or chewing tobacco, dancing, playing cards, going to the baseball game on Sunday afternoon, skipping Sunday evening church. For him, Christianity was a moral struggle with what he deplored as sin. Mama said that one Sunday morning, during a sermon against going to the local baseball game, her father raised his hand and said, "I'll be going this afternoon, Preacher, if you need a ride." And that her mother was furious and humiliated. 

The Other thing that Adrian Chiles' essay surfaced was the saying, "No manner of belief makes anything true." Which applies Not Only to his thesis about our wanting to read about surveys that confirm drinking red wine is good for the heart (which is b.s. to begin with, and getting to my age, one glass of red makes me instantly dizzy, so I've cut my consumption down to one a week) - But Also to most of life, anything can be overdone - not my steak for this coming Fathers Day Sunday - including morals and religion, self-certain religious evangelism to convert others, by force if necessary, to one's own set of beliefs; and the moral self-righteousness at work in our society today forcing others to abide by one's own standards. I lost track of it, but a recent cartoon was captioned, "Jesus didn't empower you to tell others what to do."

Including no tut-tuts if you please, the recent invitational LBGTQ?+ event at the White House where some trans-women proudly bared their breasts and some trans-men bared their scars. Who cares. Well, somebody in the WH cared, someone said inappropriate and bad taste. 

Why am I wandering down this trail into the briar patch? IDK, I honestly don't. My starting point was Chiles' thesis that we like being affirmed in what we are already certain of, even if it's nonsense. 

How do I feel about all this? I'm aging into the irrelevance of more or less just watching, a bystander. On the sidewalk, a walker watching the traffic speed by and shaking my head. For example, why would Americans want a would-be dictator for president? someone who vows that his term will be spent avenging himself of his political enemies, when political enemies are the strongest aspect of a democracy. The right and privilege of active dissent. 

Thursday. Car's in the shop for miscellaneous, including new air conditioning mechanicals.

RSF&PTL

T  

Opinion

Drinking alcohol is bad for you – end of. Ignore the headlines that claim otherwise

Another week, another article suggesting that alcohol may have health benefits. It’s amazing how desperate drinkers are to fool themselves

11:26 EDT Wednesday, 14 June 2023

It’s amazing how easy it is to persuade us that what we want to be true is true. Consider a typical headline to a story covered with great enthusiasm by many major news organisations this week: “Moderate alcohol consumption may lower stress, reduce heart disease risk, study finds.” Enthusiastic drinkers, drowning in a dark sea of health warnings, will cling on to such words as stricken sailors might hold on to the hull of their capsized boat.

They will turn a blind eye to the facts of the story, although even the headline itself, with its “may” and its “study finds”, suggests this scientific revelation isn’t quite the slam dunk we might be hoping for. Once the study’s methodology and conclusions are outlined, it’s clear that the whole thing falls into the category of quite interesting, rather than this changes everything. But who needs that level of detail? If I’m so minded, there’s as much information in the headline as I’m ever going to want or need to support my long-cherished pet theory about drinking. “I knew it! I told you so! Drinking helps me deal with stress, ergo it eases the strain on my poor ticker, therefore I’ll live longer and more happily.” I’ll file this fact away along with that one about red wine being good for you, as good as a health drink.

The problem is that there are drinkers and industry PRs and libertarian anti-“nanny state” culture warriors who will be dredging up this story to drop into conversations many years from now. “Don’t you remember the study that showed …?” etc etc. And the headline above was quite responsibly written. Many aren’t. A quick search for similar stuff put out there in the last year or so by our mainstream media yielded some beauties. How about: “Beer is GOOD for you! Scientists claim two pints a day may slash your risk of dementia”? And extra marks here for a quite ghastly second mention just below it: “Drinking two pints a day slashed risk of the memory-robbing condition by a third.” Memory-robbing condition? Oh, please.

Also highly commended: “Cheers! Drinking beer makes you happier and healthier than if you are teetotal, scientists confirm.” Confirm, mark you. Not even a “may” or a “claim” to keep it honest. But first prize has to go to: “Drink ‘thousands of varieties of wine’ to boost immunity and improve mental health.” Whaaat? “Professor Tim Spector says wine is good for improving gut health and is high in polyphenols, a group of natural defence chemicals.”

Ah yes, Professor Spector. A very clever man and no mistake. I once interviewed him about his book concerning what we eat and how we individually process certain food types differently. All clever stuff, but I got the feeling he was somehow a different breed from the rest of us, being slim and wise and sensible in all matters. I couldn’t imagine him binge-eating anything and told him as much. He claimed otherwise but struggled to name anything specific he couldn’t stop himself pigging out on. In the end, the best he came up with was that he occasionally went a bit overboard troughing too many cashew nuts. Cashews? I rest my case.

So what was this advice to drink thousands of varieties of wine all about? Had he let himself go? I needn’t have worried: once again the headline was deflated by the story. It turned out that any more than a small glass or two at one sitting would negate whatever magic the wine was working on your gut health. At that rate of intake, it’s going to take him decades to drink enough of his thousands of varieties to put his theory to the test. Stay off the cashews, prof, and I’m sure you’ll live long enough to do it.

In an era when studies of anything and everything generate reams of data that are widely available, you’re likely to find something to support whatever you happen to believe in. Alcohol good, alcohol bad; Brexit good, Brexit bad; climate in crisis, climate OK; Earth round, Earth flat. The supporting data will be there for you somewhere. And, even better, someone will have published a story on it with a headline you can screenshot to cherish for ever.

The issue of alcohol use, groaning under the weight of social convention, vast commercial interests and its own addictive properties, is ripe for this kind of headline-based sophistry. But if you search up a list of news stories on the subject over the years you find, as with the climate crisis, an overwhelming consensus: alcohol is really quite bad for you, end of. Railing against this inconvenient truth, the smattering of contradictory offerings look comically desperate. There’s the plain unlikely – “Heavy drinkers healthier and happier in later years” – and the decidedly bemusing: “Alcohol ‘has benefits for older drinkers but young should go teetotal’”.

On the other side of the argument, to counter all this, the public health lobby takes an ever more severe position. The World Health Organization is now saying that when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health. While this might be technically true, it also has an absurdity to it. As David Spiegelhalter, then professor for the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University, pointed out when England’s chief medical officer said something similar in 2018: “There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”

Lost in all this there must be a simple, usable truth that can be widely understood and accepted. Something along the lines of Michael Pollan’s summation of his conclusions about diet: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the spirit of that, I suggest the following: drink alcohol if you must, if you enjoy it, but not much of it. And ignore the bloody headlines.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist. His book The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less is out now in paperback