Challenge accepted.<\/p>\n
After a few students had their shot at practicing their medical interviewing skills on an easy setting, I just subbed in the rough numbers from my own previous week only to have a student laugh in my face and arrogantly proclaim “No way. This can’t be serious.” The instructing physician halted the session, and I had to hold back my righteous indignation like so much warm Schiltz at the back of my throat. Hell, I surpassed the patient’s intake and\u00a0was at my goddamn job that very moment, doing it brilliantly.<\/em><\/p>\n With that exchange, I became curious as to how some faceless organization at the federal level came about determining what does and does not constitute “acceptable” drinking in such a way as to reduce it to a simple number applicable to entire genders. No sliding scale, no adjustments of any kind. Low and behold, the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s report for 2015<\/a> is available online. Any group with such a bureaucratically inoffensive name must be hiding some hideous bullshit, and they tend to be very good at burying it. And buried it was. After more than a hundred mentions of “alcohol” and “moderate alcohol” consumption, they offer this unsupported definition on page 541, deep in the bowls of one of the many appendices:<\/p>\n Moderate alcohol consumption\u2014Average daily consumption of up to one drink per day for women and up to two drinks per day for men, with no more than three drinks in any single day for women and no more than four drinks in any single day for men. One drink is defined as 12 fl. oz. of regular beer, 5 fl. oz. of wine, or 1.5 fl. oz. of distilled spirits.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Nowhere is it apparent how they came to that determination. No footnotes, no citations of scientific studies, not a damn bit of evidence to support it. Granted, my bourbon binoculars\u00a0(the classier version of beer goggles, but they see deep into the truth of things) can only take in so much information at a time, but I couldn’t find\u00a0a shred of reasoning for these arbitrary numbers. So I went to the CDC’s website for Alcohol and Public Health<\/a>\u00a0to contact them with my question. This was the lush-hating lion’s den, the belly of the bureaucratic whale, so I decided to tread lightly. Here was my diplomatically worded (if not overly cautious) question:<\/p>\n Good evening,<\/p>\n I am very curious as to the science or the method behind the determination that “moderate drinking” translates to one drink per day for women and up to two drinks per day for men. I have read through the 2015 DGAC Dietary Guidelines report and took interest in Appendix E-5, lines 249-252 in which “moderate alcohol consumption” is defined. The rest of the report seems to include a lot of information behind the rationale for certain limits of other consumables and substances, but this section seems oddly light in that regard. I would be very interested to learn if this limit is the result of scientific\/dietary studies or if it is a recommendation based on either anecdotal or statistical sources outside of medical research. I appreciate the thoroughness of this report and would greatly appreciate some help in understanding how this limit was established.<\/p>\n Thank you for your time and your efforts,<\/p>\n Dylan<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Polite, isn’t it? Some careful wording, a few pleasantries to disguise what I really thought about the matter–and a fair question, to boot. They needn’t know that behind those velvet verbal gloves are iron fists steadfastly clutching a bottle of 90-proof Kentucky straight.<\/p>\n Just one last step:<\/p>\n
![\"CDC_validation_error\"](\"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/CDC_validation_error-300x300.jpg\")
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