"Tim Stockwell has been up to his old tricks. In a study that was widely publicised this week despite being published in January, he claims - yet again - that moderate drinking does not confer health benefits. The study is largely a rehash of his meta-analysis from last year (which I wrote about here) so there isn’t much more to say except to note the extraordinary amount of cherry-picking that is required to come to such a conclusion.
He and his team started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which they added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. They then discarded 103 of these because they didn’t meet Stockwell’s increasingly stringent and somewhat arbitrary criteria. This left 107 studies, but there was still work to do.
In the new study, he introduces yet another filter for “quality” and reduces the number of studies down from 21 to 18 and then 15, but these still show lower risk for moderate drinkers, so he introduces some more criteria until a vast literature built up over 50 years is whittled down to just six studies. This gets rid of the apparent benefits of moderate drinking. He then removes one more study and, voila!, moderate drinkers are now at greater risk than teetotallers."
https://snowdon.substack.com/p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-o...