Curious Reads: "I Never Touch the Stuff"

Booze is bad, even that glass of red wine with dinner, says science.

#1 Today’s “top of the fold” story is the flip flop from “booze is good for you!” to booze is BAD.

That is, in the 1990s, we thought red wine with dinner would help us live longer. “Like the French who nightly drink a glass!” we said. But recent research has revealed the opposite: even a sip of alcohol a week puts drinkers at higher risk for cancer. And now health agencies are changing their minds about alcohol.

Read Slate reporter Tim Requarth’s accounting of how the flip flop happened in both directions.

The highlights of the article:

There’s nothing wrong with a glass of wine with dinner every night, right?

[We used to think] “the evidence in the mid-’90s [was] incontrovertible, whether you liked it or not. And boy, none of the people who were concerned about the effects of alcohol on society liked that research. But they couldn’t find anything wrong with it at the time. And so, there it was; it had to be dealt with. And it got into the dietary guidelines.”

The governmental organization…