"Morley Safer, 60 Minutes" is written by Kim Marcus and appears on the Home Wine
Spectator web site. The article's headline announces that 60 Minutes Examines Stronger
Evidence Linking Wine and Good Health, with the comparative "stronger" signifying that
the evidence presented in the 5Nov95 broadcast was better than the evidence presented in
a similar 60 Minutes broadcast four years earlier. This Home Wine Spectator article
viewed your broadcast as demonstrating the existence of a causal connection between
(what some might judge a high volume of) wine consumption and longevity, underlined your
own high credibility and the high authority of your sources, pointed out the vast
audience to which your conclusions had been beamed, and suggested that wine consumption
shot up as a result of at least the first French Paradox broadcast:
The study also found that the benefits of wine drinking extended to
people who drank from three to five glasses of wine per day. "What
surprised us most was that wine intake signified much lower mortality
rates," Safer said to the television show's audience.
Overall, the segment should prove a big boost to the argument that wine
drinking in moderation can be a boon to one's health. The segment was
seen by more than 20 million people. "It isn't just information," said
John De Luca, president of California's Wine Institute, "it's the
credibility that comes with Morley Safer interviewing the scientists."
After the first French Paradox episode aired in November 1991 the
consumption of red wine shot up in the United States, and it has yet to
dip.
The Kim Marcus article underlined your failure to question the conclusion that wine
consumption increases life expectancy:
Throughout the episode, Safer didn't challenge the fact that wine is
linked to longer life; rather, he was interested in what it was about
wine that made it unique. "The central question is what is it about
wine, especially red wine, that promotes coronary health," he said.
Safer came to the conclusion that it is not only alcohol but other
unnamed compounds in wine that contributed to higher levels of
beneficial high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol.
I had already seen that French Paradox broadcast. As a matter of fact, I had watched your
French Paradox story when it was first broadcast on 5Nov95, and even while watching it I
had immediately recognized that your conclusion attributing longer life to wine drinking
was unjustified, and that you were causing harm in passing this conclusion along to a
large audience almost all of whom would accept it as true. At bottom, then, I see
little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and your Ugly Face of
Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your depth, giving
superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on, discussing
questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing damage because
your conclusions proved to be false.
In the case of the Ugly Face of Freedom, the number of your errors was large, and the
amount of data that needed to be examined to demonstrate your errors was large as well,
as can be seen by the length of my rebuttal The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes. In the case of
the French Paradox, however, you make only one fundamental error which is to fail to
grasp the difference between experimental and correlational data - and my demonstration
of your error can compactly be contained within the present letter.
The reason that I am able to assert with some confidence that your conclusion that wine
drinking increases longevity is unjustified is as follows. I have a Ph.D. in
experimental psychology from Stanford, I taught in the Department of Psychology at the
University of Western Ontario for eleven years, and my teaching and my interests fell
largely into the areas of statistics, research methodology, and data interpretation.
Everyone with expertise in scientific method will agree with me that your conclusion in
The French Paradox was unwarranted. It is not necessary to read the original research
papers on which you rely to arrive at this same judgment - even the brief review of the
research data in your broadcast, even the briefer review of your broadcast in the Kim
Marcus quotations above - is enough for someone who has studied scientific method to see
that you were wrong. Below is my explanation.
The French Paradox Research
Cannot Have Been Experimental
There are two ways in which data relating wine consumption to longevity could have been
gathered - either in an experiment, or in a correlational study. If the data had been
gathered in an experiment, then it would have been done something like this. A number
of subjects (by which I mean human experimental subjects) would have been randomly
assigned to groups, let us say 11 different groups. The benefit of random assignment is
that it guarantees that the subjects in each group are initially equivalent in every
conceivable respect - equivalent in male-female ratio, in age, in health, in income, in
