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Say 'please' ...

I read on the Alcohol Research UK website that a study has indicated that posters encouraging moderate drinking are largely ignored in a pub environment. Well, knock me down with a feather!

Dr Daniel Frings, Associate Professor of Psychology at London South Bank University, who led the study, said, "On average, our Pub-Lab volunteers aimed nearly eight times as many glances at their own drinks than at responsible drinking posters." Well, obviously. You don't go to pubs to read posters; you go for a drink.

I haven't wasted any money researching this, but I think I can state with some certainty that at football matches, fans spend very little time reading the adverts all around the edge of the pitch. Any cash-strapped university department that would like to charge the FA a small fortune for researching this phenomenon is welcome to the idea.

Why aren't we avidly reading these posters?

• The 'moderate drinking' message has become somewhat self-defeating. Many people don't believe the 14 units per week limit that the anti-alcohol campaigners vacuously chant. I have written a number of times before, most recently here, that the limits are largely discredited, and rightly so. If one part of your message lacks credibility, then so will the rest.
• People often don't notice posters, especially when there are so many displayed, or there are other visual distractions such as pictures or television, with the result that individual posters just get lost. CAMRA beer festivals make the same mistake; they put up far too many posters so that hardly any get noticed, let alone read.
• Simplest of all: adults are bored stiff of being nagged, especially when they have gone out to enjoy themselves.

There could be some money in this: I wonder how you go about getting a grant for researching "the bleeding obvious"?

Take it to the limit

The question of alcohol units has been raised again, this time by CAMRA who have pointed out that in a YouGov poll that surveyed 2040 people, 61% agreed that alcohol can be part of a healthy lifestyle, and 51% disagreed that the recommended units should be the same for men and for women. In another poll of doctors earlier this year, two thirds disagreed with the Chief Medical Officer for England's (CMOE's) assertion that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

Colin Valentine, CAMRA's national chair, made a point that has been made on this blog previously: if the current units lack credibility, as the YouGov poll suggests, or if there is insufficient plausible scientific evidence to support them, people will simply ignore them. That should be rather obvious, even to the CMOE.

A couple of years ago, the Independent reported that a former World Health Organisation alcohol expert Dr Kari Poikolainen had analysed decades of research into the effects of alcohol on the human body, concluding that drinking is only harmful when you consume more than 13 units a day - four to five pints of beer or more than a bottle of wine. He added that drinking more than the CMOE-approved recommended daily intake may in fact be healthier than being a teetotaller, but that heavy drinking could be worse than abstaining.

The CMOE's position is illogical anyway. On the one hand, she says that 14 units is the recommended safe limit, but she then claims that here is no safe limit at all. It has to be one or the other, not both. Such mixed messages will only reduce her credibility even further.