How a dry January ends up being a gift to the booze industry

Drinks makers will always protect their own interests, so you might think that they view a booze-free month as a threat

It seems we are a nation of liars when it comes to how much we really drink. I know this because the amount of alcohol sold in a year is far greater than the amount people say they drink when asked in surveys of alcohol use. Being economical with the truth in a survey is pretty harmless, but lying to ourselves about the relationship we have with alcohol is not so good.

One way of working out what role alcohol plays in your life is to see what happens when you temporarily stop drinking. Rather than do this on your own, Dry January provides an opportunity to join an estimated 5 million people abstaining from alcohol for a month.

Alcohol Change UK, which organises the Dry January campaign, are hoping we will all re-evaluate our relationship with alcohol. But after eight years of this annual drive for abstinence we still don’t know if it works or produces the claimed benefits of improved sleep, weight loss and generally feeling healthier.

Researchers have tried to investigate the impact of Dry January on a sample of those who signed up to last year’s campaign. At first glance the results look promising with participants reporting that abstaining from alcohol in January continued all the way through to August.

Sounds great, right? But the researchers were only able to check this with less than one in three of those surveyed at the start of the research in January – begging the question of what happened to the majority of participants who dropped out of the research?

It could be that they too benefited from abstaining; equally they may have found abstaining too difficult or found no benefit, we just don’t know.

But even among those who were followed up and reported positive effects it is difficult to be certain that this is due to abstaining from alcohol, as people tend to change other aspects of their lives at the same time that they give up alcohol. These people might exercise more or alter their diet, changes that will produce similar benefits to not drinking. Overall this is a complicated and messy area to explore for researchers.

That is useful for the alcohol industry, which is itself adept at distorting information about alcohol. For example, the industry collaborated with Public Health England recently for a campaign promoting drink-free days. The campaign included an app which provided feedback that downplayed the risk to health from alcohol. The logic to this seemingly odd collaboration appears to have been based on the idea that public health should work “with” rather than “against” industry.

At best, though, this was a misguided move by Public Health England or at worst was the result of persistent and calculated lobbying by the industry.

As a business the alcohol industry will protect its own interests, so you might think that it views Dry January as a threat, but I don’t think it does.

Frankly, Dry January is not aimed at the 4 per cent of people who consume nearly a third of all the alcohol available, and these are the alcohol industry’s core and loyal customers. So Dry January ends up diverting attention away from those who most need support in reducing the harmful levels of consumption.

At a time when mental health services and specialist alcohol treatment budgets are being savagely cut, the alcohol industry needn’t worry about its dependable and dependent customers. Unlike these services, alcohol has no waiting lists and provides immediate relief from troubling thoughts and feelings, in the short term at least.

So with an industry that distorts the facts about alcohol and our own inability to be truthful about how much we drink, the change we really need is honesty. The first step to change is admitting we have a problem.

Ian Hamilton is senior lecturer in Mental Health at the University of York