Éduc’alcool will launch for the first time in mid-October a campaign without its slogan “Moderation tastes much better”. The organization also removed from its website in 2022 the notions of quantity of “low-risk” consumption and decided to focus on the reasons that push Quebecers to drink.
These changes come on the heels of the publication of new limits recommended by the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), indicating that no alcohol consumption is without risk.
In 2011, the CCSA published a report funded by Health Canada entitled Canadian benchmarks on alcohol and health which recommended the famous weekly limit of 15 drinks for men and 10 drinks for women, long promoted in Éduc’alcool advertisements.
A little over a decade later, an update of these benchmarks was carried out by the same scientific experts, who came to a very different conclusion: there is no safe limit for alcohol consumption.
Although Health Canada has not yet endorsed these new recommendations, it has granted CCSA an additional sum of $2 million over two years, for the period 2023-2025, “to inform the development of mobilization tools and knowledge dissemination tools that communicate the risks and harms of alcohol consumption to diverse populations in Canada.
The office of the federal Minister of Mental Health and Addictions informed the Duty that discussions were taking place with the various stakeholders concerned and that “the final guidelines will be the result of these future discussions to which the CCUS will contribute”.
Expert War
The publication of CCSA report in January 2023 made it possible to note the presence of a war of parochialism in research on alcohol and health.
Strong criticism came from researchers at the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research (ISFAR), who questioned the methodology used by CCSA and alleged that three experts who worked on the new recommendations had connections with Movendi International, a movement advocating an alcohol-free lifestyle.
Duty consulted the conflict of interest declaration completed by the authors of the new Canadian Landmarks. Three of the 24 scientific experts indeed declared having participated in an event sponsored by Movendi International between 2018 and 2020. But the Monitoring Committee responsible for evaluating and judging their interests noted “no concerns regarding conflicts of interest » in these three cases.
“I drink alcohol myself,” says, still annoyed, Tim Stockwell, one of the authors of the study. “The alcohol industry is trying to make it appear that we are a biased group of prohibitionists and extremist activists when all we are doing is reporting the evidence in an impartial manner,” adds the man who led the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research from the University of Victoria from 2004 to 2020.
If he talks about the alcohol industry, it is because ISFAR members have links to it. Australian researcher Creina Stockley, co-director of ISFAR, worked from 1991 to 2018 at the Australian Wine Research Institute. She admitted that sometimes researchers in her organization accept research funds from industry, since funding is “difficult to obtain from governments”, but assures that ISFAR members are independent scientists.
An independence questioned by Dr. Stockwell and Dr. Peter R. Butt, of the College of Family Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, who co-chaired both versions of CCSA recommendations.
“These are scientists who come from laboratories where research is funded by industry,” says Dr. Butt. So it’s a biased approach in favor of the alcohol industry, and these are the individuals that the industry will seek out to say that there is a controversy [à propos des connaissances sur l’alcool]. The alcohol industry is using the same playbook that the tobacco industry has used in the past. »
A problem of popularization
Peter R. Butt believes that the update of the recommendations was mainly criticized because it did not suit the alcohol industry.
“The previous figures we achieved in 2011 were satisfactory for the industry. [… ] However, science has evolved and we have a better understanding of the relationship between alcohol and health. The more you drink, the more problematic it becomes. We were also much more transparent because of the evidence we had regarding the relationship between alcohol and cancer,” he says.
“Alcohol is a category 1 carcinogen [selon l’Organisation mondiale de la santé]and this has been known since the 1980s, but the evidence has become increasingly strong,” he says.
With hindsight, Dr. Butt believes that the fruit of the analysis carried out by the experts he supervised was above all clumsily popularized among the general public.
“Our main recommendation was that everyone living in Canada should consider reducing the amount of alcohol they consume. Period. We didn’t say that no one should drink more than two drinks a week. In general, we just encourage people to drink less because it will improve their health. There is very good evidence for this. This isn’t about abstinence, it’s just about saying that less is more. »
Since the publication of the CCSA report, two new credible studies (one produced by the World Health Organization, the other published in the Journal of the American Medical Association) led to similar conclusions.
