Guidelines on safe alcohol consumption limits introduced 20 years ago were based on little more than an “intelligent guess”.
According to a report in The Times newspaper, the weekly drinking limits of 21 units for men and 14 for women, first introduced in 1987, had no firm scientific basis.
Later studies found evidence that recommended that the guidelines should be raised, but numerous health ministers ignored them. One study showed that men drinking between 21 and 30 units of alcohol a week had the lowest mortality rates in the country, much higher than the 21 units the government recommends. Another study concluded that a man would have to consume 63 units a week to face the same risk of death as someone who does not drink at all.
Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party, that produced the 1987 recommendations told the paper the guidelines were prompted by “a feeling that you had to say something”.
He said: "Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee."
The committee's epidemiologist had confessed: "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't" because "we don't really have any data whatsoever", according to Mr Smith.
The former editor of the British Medical Journal said members of the working party were concerned by growing evidence of the damage caused by heavy long-term drinking and so they felt obliged to produced safe drinking guidelines.
The revelation casts doubt over a recent report, commissioned by the Government, that blamed middle-class wine drinkers for pushing some of Britain’s most affluent towns to the top of the ‘hazardous drinking’ list as it relied on the 1987 guidelines.
But a coalition of health organisations, headed by the Royal College of Physicians, is still building a campaign to force a 10 per cent increase in alcohol taxation and stricter regulation of the drinks industry and alcohol advertising.