New Health Advice for Britons: No More Than a Glass of Wine a Day

"Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used," the villain Iago says in Shakespeare's "Othello." The new guidelines say that to reduce health risks, men and women should not drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week, roughly the equivalent of seven glasses of wine, six pints of beer, or half a bottle of whiskey. In a country where "lager louts" have been known to wreak havoc, civic groups applauded the new measures and health advocates called them a necessary corrective after decades of new research showed that even moderate alcohol consumption was harmful to the health. "The chief medical officer has focused on small increases in cancer risk while ignoring the much larger body of evidence that shows moderate drinking reduces heart disease risk and, most importantly, reduces the overall risk of death," Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at Institute of Economic Affairs, a research group in London that favors free markets, said in a statement.