Do public health scare stories lag behind people's actual behaviour?

From Reason here's a quote about the decline in soda (that's pop to us Brits) consumption:

"Over the last 20 years," Sanger-Katz reports, "sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent." In other words, the downward trend began more than a decade before the soda tax debates in New York state (2009), Washington state (2010), and Philadelphia (2010). Americans began drinking less soda nearly two decades before Berkeley approved a soda tax and San Francisco rejected one, both of which happened last year.

So the great debates we see about sugar loaded fizzy drinks have been presaged by a profound shift in consumer behaviour. Yet this doesn't stop the public health scare story:

It will help explain why childhood obesity rates have risen so dramatically within a generation: in the US, where a third of children are overweight or obese, the average weight of a child has risen by more than 5kg in three decades.

Put those two quotes together and you get a "just a second, are you sure?" response to one or the other. On the face of it both can't be true.

So a question - are the scare stories about diet, about drinking or other choice behaviours a reflection of behavioural changes that are already happening? The great scares about alcohol in the UK - "Binge-drinking is getting out of control in Britain" or whatever - started flooding the newspapers and airwaves during a time when alcohol consumption was falling rapidly. It's almost as if these scares simply reflect people's changing habits - almost a means of society dealing with cognitive dissonance.

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Giving your teenaged daughter a drink won't make her a drunkard

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A single glass of wine or beer at the age of 14 can push a young teenager along the path to binge drinking, say scientists. 

So begins the Daily Telegraph's report on some research into the psychological factors in adolescents that might predict whether they become "binge drinkers" at sixteen.  The thing is that this isn't what the researchers are saying. They aren't arguing that if you allow your fourteen-year-old daughter a half glass of champagne on New Year's Eve she will become, in short order, a raging alcoholic. Yet that is what is being implied here.

The research (or rather what is being reported) tells us that the researchers have a jolly model based on a series of 'personality' factors that has a 70% chance of predicting that a given young person will be 'binge drinking' at age sixteen. Now my gut instinct is that, like lots of psychological metrics, the model is deeply flawed. However, if we accept what it is saying, it is still a pretty blunt instrument that will both fail to identify young people 'at risk' and also identify young people who aren't 'at risk'.

Finally, we are having all population solutions - don't let your child drink - proposed for what is clearly not an all population problem. Indeed, although the size of the whole study cohort (2,000) is given we have no idea how many of the young people surveyed actually drink. We know that over 80% of adolescents don't drink at all and that most of those who do drink, don't so so dangerously. So even with the study's broad definition of 'binge drinking' (based on self-reported drunkenness) the numbers involved are likely to be very small. The certainty of the findings has to be questioned given these numbers (plus the likelihood of young people overstating consumption).

It is useful to study adolescent development and, clearly, risk-taking behaviour could be a predictor of many things (some good like being future innovators, creators and entrepreneurs) but to argue that giving a child a drink will "push" them into binge drinking is a complete misrepresentation of the research.

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Two-and-a-half pints of lager...

"Sorry sir, that's all I can serve you."

"What d'ya mean? I'm not driving, I can have a third pint!"

"Sorry, just a half. Otherwise you're drinking dangerously."

This is the world of the temperance fanatics, nannying fussbuckets and health fascists, a world where two-and-a-half pints of premium lager is 'binge drinking':

Drinking six units of alcohol on one single occasion at least monthly amounts to “heavy episodic drinking”, according to a recent report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has said 16% of the world’s population are now binge drinkers.

This is barking. Not only is there no evidence to support describing this as 'dangerous' but it completely undermines genuine efforts to promote a healthy attitude to drinking. But no-one faces up to these fussbuckets, says to them - 'sorry mate but that's plain stupid, now shut up and go away'.

This is a world where sitting down is bad for you, where you can't enjoy sitting in the sunshine and where using a harmless product like an e-cig is deemed bad simple because it looks like harmful smoking. And yet hardly a day passes by without another call for ad restrictions, price hikes, sales control, mandated packaging and outright bans - on salt, sugar, fats, fast food, cigars, lemonade, alcohol in any form, tanning beds, bacon and even fruit juice.

All the things people like - especially the things that working class people like - are to be controlled. We are to live a purposeful, sober, salad-filled life for the good of our health. Indeed government will mandate the times you can drink, the places you can smoke (are there many left) and the size of the portions you eat.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. Remember that the next time someone links 'binge drinking' to ten-year-old photographs of a girls lying pissed on a bench - two-and-a-half pints of lager, three glasses of white wine, two large vodka and cokes. That's the limit of the fun you're allowed on a Friday night if you aren't to fall foul of the health police.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. It's a bloody joke.

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Now about those young people binge drinking...

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Today at Bradford's full council meeting one councillor (from 'the party formerly known as Respect') asked a question about the 'night time economy' on Great Horton Road. Now those who know Bradford will appreciate that this is the area around the University and, it appears, there is the familiar 'students are spoiling our lovely community by enjoying themselves' campaign.

However, it seems to me that, compared to my experience thirty years ago, today's students are a more abstemious, more serious bunch:

Many seemed to be cutting back their alcohol intake - only 22 per cent of undergraduates reported drinking more than 11 units a week (equivalent to about five and a half pints of beer), compared with 28 per cent in 2010 and 33 per cent in 2008.

And dig a little deeper and we find that a third of students report that they don't drink at all and a further 40% limited the drinking to just once a week. Now there are plenty of reasons for this - partly it's the additional pressure that having big loans brings and partly it's a wider shift (non-students in this age group are a pretty sober bunch as well). However, what it does tell us, is that the old hedonistic 'party party' image of student life really doesn't describe the reality.

Yet again the lie of public health (and Daily Mail) campaigns about 'binge drinking' is revealed - most young people have neither the cash nor the inclination to drink in the manner of past generations. Despite this truth - revealed in survey after survey, study upon study - we're still told that young people are being corrupted by drink ads and offers, are 'pre-loading' with super-cheap alcohol and generally destroying their health.

Will there ever be a point when the public health folk stop the fibs about binge drinking?

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