MORE GOOD NEWS ABOUT BOOZE: And at such an opportune moment! But this passage is troubling:

Thirty years ago, policy makers just preferred to keep the whole conundrum quiet. The Framingham study, which began to examine risks for heart disease in 1948, was one of the first big studies to find heart benefits from alcohol. One of its researchers, Dr. Carl Seltzer, wrote in a short 1996 memoir that when he and his colleagues informed their government sponsors at the National Heart and Lung Institute in 1972 of these findings, they were forbidden to publish them.

Isn’t this, sort of, like tobacco companies covering up bad news because it would hurt their agenda? It seems reasonable to believe that quite a few lives could have been saved had this research not been suppressed.

And this underscores a point that I’ve made before: claims that the politicization of science is something that only the Bush Administration is engaged in are, well, lies. Public health has always been politicized, which is one reason why people are distrustful today.