SCIENCE: The abstemious scientists accused of using ‘flawed’ research to tell you to stop drinking.

Dr Tim Stockwell’s work – which has been published in The Lancet, among other esteemed organs – has inspired a new crackdown on alcohol that has seen daily drinking guidelines slashed in Canada and Australia. The US may next year follow suit, and the UK anti-alcohol lobby is using Dr Stockwell’s work as it warms up for a similar fight.

But many of Dr Stockwell’s respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research. They question his motives and accuse him of being a front for a worldwide temperance lobby that is secretly attempting to ban alcohol.

Plus:

The research was widely reported without a hint of the row it had triggered in the scientific community. In common with other news outlets, The Daily Mail stated baldly that the longstanding belief that one or two drinks a day is good for you was based on “flawed” scientific research.

However, it was the final straw for many fellow academics and experts who told The Telegraph they read the report in disbelief, concluding it was yet another example of Dr Stockwell “cherry picking” the evidence to suit his agenda.

Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told The Telegraph that Dr Stockwell had wrongly taken a correlation to be causal.

“Dr Stockwell’s research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations,” Dr Harding said. “You record people’s lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it’s just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own.

“And in this particular case, Dr Stockwell selected six studies out of 107 to focus on. You could say he cherry picked them.”

Seems like the vegetarians have been running something like this for years.