The UK Department of Health is now advising that pregnant women - and those trying for a baby - should avoid alcohol completely.
Previous advice was not to drink more than one, to two, units of alcohol, once, or twice, a week - and be sure not to get drunk at all.
The Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Fiona Adshead stated:
"We have strengthened our advice to women to help ensure that no-one underestimates the risk to the developing foetus of drinking above the recommended safe levels.”
There appears to be no new evidence and no new studies to suggest the previous advice was unsafe.
From what Dr Adshead said, it appears reason they are changing the government line is because they think many women are unable to understand the previous advice - so they have decided to recommend against all alcohol?
So then, this looks rather like another example of the nanny state treating us as if we are all idiots, incapable of making sensible decisions ourselves.
Just because there may be a minority who cannot, or will not, look after themselves it does not mean all of us are not capable.
What next? Compulsory padded mittens and no cutlery?
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2 comments:
"So then, this looks rather like another example of the nanny state treating us as if we are all idiots..."
Wrong diagnosis. This is public health advice but it is bad public health advice, because it is spun. We are being advised to believe something for our own good, a meme "alcohol in pregnancy is bad". But it undermines the authority of scientific medicine to issue this unsupported assertion. If evidence is not at the heart of health advice, it's just the opinion of a technocrat.
The worrying thing is that the people who are putting this stuff out must be "idiots" to go along with it. Of course some of them value belief over knowledge...
I would say, yes, like simple idiots, in the original sense.
If not like idiots then, like small children. Having the message ‘simplified’ so it isn’t quite true, but ‘for our own good’.
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