Nearly a half century ago, Paul Rozin showed that if you label a substance as "not poison", people grow wary of it anyway. Because they're thinking of poison now.
So of course seeing a product labeled as "non-alcoholic" makes people think of alcohol. How could they not?
Which is to say that maybe the study design is a priori worthless, to put it harshly.
The researchers are on a completely wrong track if the think big-beer are cynically marketing low and no alcohol products to promote consumption of their alcoholic twin.
Assuming the production process hasn’t changed, when I was involved in the process the brewery brewed their standard fare in the standard way, at standard cost. They then removed the alcohol, claimed the tax back on the alcohol that had been removed, sold it for medical purposes (tax-free), and then sold the low/no alcohol stuff for the same price as the standard fare. Genius!
I would love to know when public health ppl completely lost the point of harm reduction. The fact that better research shows Nolo are used to reduce alcohol consumption (cycling between NA and alc for example) and to provide a “healthier” option to booze seems to be completely alien to them.
Two things. From my deep dive into the academic world, leaving R&D for 17 years as a professor in a Comp Sci department, methodology now rules all (see https://datchet.substack.com/p/reflections-on-higher-education-2?r=1otfa7). Increasingly, that means that you can only ask questions that have already been set up in the literature.
Secondly, you can only use methods that are acceptable by frequent use and, from a practical standpoint, for which ethical approval may be relatively easy secured. This usually pitches you into a pure-play qualitative experiment (where you have to be really good and really self-aware to make much progress) or a directly quantitative approach - such as responding to pictures on a screen. Neither Marconi or Newton (or many researchers whose names begin with A to L or O-Z) would have made it in the modern scene.
Thanks for sharing a bit about the methodology.
Nearly a half century ago, Paul Rozin showed that if you label a substance as "not poison", people grow wary of it anyway. Because they're thinking of poison now.
So of course seeing a product labeled as "non-alcoholic" makes people think of alcohol. How could they not?
Which is to say that maybe the study design is a priori worthless, to put it harshly.
The researchers are on a completely wrong track if the think big-beer are cynically marketing low and no alcohol products to promote consumption of their alcoholic twin.
Assuming the production process hasn’t changed, when I was involved in the process the brewery brewed their standard fare in the standard way, at standard cost. They then removed the alcohol, claimed the tax back on the alcohol that had been removed, sold it for medical purposes (tax-free), and then sold the low/no alcohol stuff for the same price as the standard fare. Genius!
The real genius: a drinker has to drink twice as much to get a buzz. Sales double immediately.
I would love to know when public health ppl completely lost the point of harm reduction. The fact that better research shows Nolo are used to reduce alcohol consumption (cycling between NA and alc for example) and to provide a “healthier” option to booze seems to be completely alien to them.
I'm reminded of that Monty Python sketch about Australian philosophy professors. Anyone like to guess which researcher was in charge of the sheep dip?
Of course it took eleven people! You need to maximize the number of CV’s on which the published “research” will appear.
This article by Sir David Spiegelhalter and his subsequent commentary has to take the cake in terms of revealing how idiotic this neo-prohibitionist public health scare is regarding alcohol, in particular this - https://medium.com/wintoncentre/the-risks-of-alcohol-again-2ae8cb006a4a
Calling all public health officials to place MASSIVE WARNING LABELS on all automobiles WARNING everyone that there is NO SAFE LEVEL OF DRIVING!
Two things. From my deep dive into the academic world, leaving R&D for 17 years as a professor in a Comp Sci department, methodology now rules all (see https://datchet.substack.com/p/reflections-on-higher-education-2?r=1otfa7). Increasingly, that means that you can only ask questions that have already been set up in the literature.
Secondly, you can only use methods that are acceptable by frequent use and, from a practical standpoint, for which ethical approval may be relatively easy secured. This usually pitches you into a pure-play qualitative experiment (where you have to be really good and really self-aware to make much progress) or a directly quantitative approach - such as responding to pictures on a screen. Neither Marconi or Newton (or many researchers whose names begin with A to L or O-Z) would have made it in the modern scene.