Tukukkk

Before answering the question of whether we can trust health advice we must first ask: ‘Which health advice?’ It varies so much over time and between countries. In 1979, the government advised men to drink no more than 56 units of alcohol a week. This was later reduced to 36 units, then 28 units and then 21 units. Last month, the Chief Medical Officer reduced it once again, this time to 14 units.

– Christopher Snowdon in The Spectator

According to the current UK official guidelines a unit of alcohol equals 10 ml or 8 grams of pure alcohol (ethanol).

If the definition of an alcohol unit has not changed (Christopher Snowdon doesn't state this explicitly but it is heavily implied – otherwise the comparison wouldn't make sense at all) this would mean: In 1979 a man drinking an astonishing amount of e.g. two bottles Bacardi rum (700 ml with 37.5% alcohol by volume) every week would (with 53 units) still not exceed the guidelines.

Now, of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the guidelines were much more lax back than. But I have doubts that it was that extreme.

So is it true that (for men) in 1979 the official UK recommended alcohol limit was four times as high as the current one?

I tried to follow the trail, but was unsuccessful.

In 1994, an (not peer-reviewed) letter by was published in the British Medical Journal by G Winstanley (representing an organisation that represents a number of UK drinks producers). It claimed:

In 1979 a special committee of the Royal College of Psychiatrists stated that the absolute upper weekly limit was about 56 units of alcohol.

Winstanley gave the source as:

• Royal College of Psychiatrists. Alcohol and alcoholism. Report of a special committee. London: Tavistock, 1979

Now, that is not quite the same as "the government advised men to drink no more than 56 units of alcohol a week", but it seems very likely we are talking about the same source.

I haven't found an online version of the 1979 book (although it is available in libraries) The book is available on Google Books, which allows you to view snippets of scanned sections, but my repeated attempts to search for the appropriate recommendation failed.

Meanwhile, a 2012 report of Alcohol Guidelines from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee paints another story. [Hat tip to @richardb for the useful find.]

In a section titled "History of alcohol guidelines" they suggest the first set of advice about drinking from the UK Government appeared in 1981:

In 1981, the UK Health Departments published the booklet Drinking Sensibly, which provided a definition of alcohol misuse and introduced the concept of sensible drinking.

It was later still that some advice regarding 56 standard drinks appeared:

It was not until 1984
that guidance on individual drinking was produced, in a pamphlet That’s the Limit, published by the then Health Education Council. The pamphlet gave “safe limits” for drinking, defined as 18 “standard drinks” a week for men and 9 for women. One standard drink was equivalent to one alcohol unit—a concept that would be introduced in the next edition. The pamphlet also defined “too much” alcohol as 56 standard drinks a week for men and 35 for women.

I conclude that it is likely that the Royal College of Psychiatrists made some statement about 56 units of alcohol, but that's not the same as an official recommendation to its citizens.

Actual recommendations didn't appear until 1984, and they did not condone the drinking of 56 units of alcohol.

No. But for the simple reason that the UK in 1979 did not have a country wide guideline. Yes in the sense that in 1979 one such guideline was proposed. From that starting point the constant lowering of these values was to be observed. Most strikingly, individual benefit for any of these guidelines seem to have been a target value of near zero over the course of the efforts evolutions. Instead choosing 'a trickle down effect will come' for this approach as well.

It's a little unclear what 'official' in this sense means. In the earlier years the focus on "units of alcohol" seems also quite fuzzy. From the '60s to 1981 it was just "everybody likes a drink. Nobody likes a drunk". And the campaigns were more directed at the North-East region of England to try out campaign effects:

The final stage of the HEC’s anti-alcohol campaign in the north east was framed around a desire to promote ‘moderate drinking’. Those involved in devising the campaign wanted it to focus on heightening awareness of alcohol problems rather than cutting the consumption of alcohol per se. The HEC dropped Saatchi and Saatchi, and instead made use of a Newcastle-based advertising agency, Redlands. The agency devised new campaign materials featuring local TV presenter and botanist, David Bellamy. Bellamy was chosen by Redlands because they felt that he would be seen by the public as intelligent and honest, but also able to connect with the intended audience as he was from the north east and a drinker himself. The advertisements offered guidance on how much alcohol was ‘too much’ (five pints of beer or more) and also suggested a level of moderate consumption as being ‘something like two or three pints two or three times a week’ (Figure 4). Indeed, the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption were tacitly ac- knowledged by the campaign’s tagline ‘Why spoil a good thing?’.

The setting of drinking limits was, however, controversial. There was little agreement amongst experts about what a ‘safe’ level of drinking consisted of. In their 1979 report, the Royal College of Psychiatrists suggested that four pints, four double whiskies or one bottle of wine a day ‘constitute reasonable guidelines of the upper limit of drinking’. Yet, other experts were concerned that setting an upper limit would encourage people to drink up to that level in the belief that their behaviour could do no harm.

Taken together, the three phases of the HEC’s alcohol education campaign in the north east points to an evolution in targets, techniques and tactics. In the first phase of the campaign, the target group seemed to be alcoholics, or the ‘drunk’. In the second phase, the target group was the ‘boozer’ or the ‘heavy drinker’. In the final phase, it appeared that a wider drinking public was the target, with the desire to promote ‘sensible’ or ‘moderate’ drinking. The techniques also altered over time, with humour and emotional entreaties giving way to a more ‘rational’ approach, appealing to the drinker as a ‘sensible’ individual able to moderate their behaviour. Such changing techniques spoke also to changing tactics, with a more specific sense of the kinds of behaviour that should be encouraged or discouraged emerging by the end of the period. These shifts reflected broader developments at the policy level that will be explored in the remainder of the article, but at the same time there was also a lack of confidence about health education itself. Significant doubts were expressed, not least by the HEC, about the ability of health education to shrink alcohol consumption. Other means, such as reducing drinking at the population level, seemed to offer an alternative solution.

On a practical level, a more specific notion of what sensible drinking consisted of in terms of the amount of alcohol consumed began to develop in the latter half of the 1980s. Suggested daily limits had already been proposed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, but in 1984 the HEC issued a pamphlet setting out the ‘safe limits’, to which people should restrict their drinking. ‘Safe limits’ for drinking were defined as 18 ‘standard drinks’ (equivalent to half a pint of beer, a small glass of wine or a single measure of spirits) a week for men and nine for women. In 1986 and 1987 the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of General Practitioners each published reports on alcohol, and all made the same recommendations with regards to consumption limits. The reports suggested that ‘sensible limits of drinking’ consisted of not more than 21 ‘units’ of alcohol a week for men, and not more than 14 units a week for women. A unit of alcohol was equal to 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol, or about half a pint of beer. In January 2016, the recommended weekly limit to alcohol consumption for men (previously 21 units) was brought into line with that of women (14 units).

Alex Mold: "‘Everybody Likes a Drink. Nobody Likes a Drunk’. Alcohol, Health Education and the Public in 1970s Britain", Social History of Medicine, Volume 30, Issue 3, 1 August 2017, Pages 612–636, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkw094