Alcoholic Denial

IN 1972, Harvard epidemiologist Carl Seltzer examined data from the Framingham Heart Study and found that drinkers were less liable to heart disease than abstainers. As it turned out, the Framingham project was the first of many studies to identify moderate alcohol consumption as a prophylactic against heart disease. But the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research, refused to let Seltzer publish a paper about this result. An NIH official said, “An article which openly invites the encouragement of undertaking drinking with the implication of prevention of coronary heart disease would be scientifically misleading and socially undesirable in view of the major health problem of alcoholism that already exists in the country.”

This episode, which Seltzer recounts in the May 1997 Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, illustrates the Federal Government’s long-standing prejudice against alcohol. A quarter of a century after the NIH put the kibosh on Seltzer’s paper, the connection between alcohol consumption and a reduced risk of heart disease is well established. More than fifty epidemiological studies have looked for a link, and almost all have confirmed the relationship found in the Framingham data. The research indicates that the risk of heart disease for moderate drinkers is 40 to 80 per cent the risk faced by abstainers.

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Stanton Peele

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IN 1972, Harvard epidemiologist Carl Seltzer examined data from the Framingham Heart Study and found that drinkers were less liable to heart disease than abstainers. As it turned out, the Framingham project was the first of many studies to identify moderate alcohol consumption as a prophylactic against heart disease. But the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research, refused to let Seltzer publish a paper about this result. An NIH official said, “An article which openly invites the encouragement of undertaking drinking with the implication of prevention of coronary heart disease would be scientifically misleading and socially undesirable in view of the major health problem of alcoholism that already exists in the country.”

This episode, which Seltzer recounts in the May 1997 Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, illustrates the Federal Government’s long-standing prejudice against alcohol. A quarter of a century after the NIH put the kibosh on Seltzer’s paper, the connection between alcohol consumption and a reduced risk of heart disease is well established. More than fifty epidemiological studies have looked for a link, and almost all have confirmed the relationship found in the Framingham data. The research indicates that the risk of heart disease for moderate drinkers is 40 to 80 per cent the risk faced by abstainers.