How business, doctors and journalists prey on your food anxieties I

levels of high-densitv [ipoprotein, the "good" cholesterol
that rids the bodv of the artery-clogging kind .
Pass the bottle? Not so fast . The trouble with most of
these medical studies is that thev look at a fiw factors in
isolation . Okav, a little booze is good for vour heart . But
what does it do for your chances of suttering cancer,
stroke, cirrhosis of the liver or your chances of ending otF
the road in an overturned car?
The moral of the ston• is : Drink if you like, but not
because it will make you live longer .
In fact, the Ne~a+ Englarrd Journal ofMedicine-whose
editorials continue to endorse the new drink-a-day-keepsthodoctor-away
regimen-published a study in June
showing that alcohol can raise blood pressure significantly .
You can't make sense of such conflicting reports .
Aren't medical journal articles peer-vetted, scientific
<strong>and</strong> thereforc unimpeachable? Don't believe ir . A l<strong>and</strong>mark
1972 article in the journal Pediatrics almost singleh<strong>and</strong>edly
created an industry of sudden-infant-death prevention
. A cluster of flve cases in one upstate New York
family supposedly showed that there was a genetic component
to the syndrome ; prevention included monitoring
devices <strong>and</strong> varying advice for positioning sleeping babies
in the crib .
Whoops . Turns out that that New York mother nmrdered
her five children . Pediatrics ran a retraction some
20 years later . By then moms <strong>and</strong> dads had lost a lot of
sleep rmnecessarilq .
Porbcs . August 14. 1990 2 0
4 6 b- 3 3 8 9 131
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/agf97d00/pdf