Top all-time · #25850
Christopher Snowdon
Personal blog · snowdon.substack.comhealthdata
Christopher Snowdon writes The Snowdon Substack, a personal blog at snowdon.substack.com about health and data. Since 2022, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Christopher Snowdon's Substack for critiques of alcohol research and public health studies, including a study on drinking under 40 and a Scottish minimum pricing study.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Things that irritate me, often bad statistics.
What Hacker News says?
The story, and the study, are terrible. Chris Snowden demolishes it here: https://snowdon.substack.com/p/is-drinking-never-good-for-pe... > Notice, by the way, that nobody involved in this research is recommending that teetotallers over the age of 40 should start drinking moderately, despite the study showing that this would improve their health. Even in the world of 'public health', fanaticism has its limits.
Comment linking /p/is-drinking-never-good-for-people
on “Study: Alcohol is never good for people under 40”This NS piece is complete misinformation. This below is by a writer who has been writing about this sort of thing for years. "Tim Stockwell has been up to his old tricks. In a study that was widely publicised this week despite being published in January, he claims - yet again - that moderate drinking does not confer health benefits. The study is largely a rehash of his meta-analysis from last year (which I wrote abo…
Comment linking /p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-on-alcohol
on “Why many studies wrongly claim it's healthy to drink a little alcohol”A bit more nuanced attack on Stockwell. He and his team started with 3,248 relevant studies of which 3,125 were immediately discarded. This left 123 cohort studies to which they added 87 relatively recent cohort studies. They then discarded 103 of these because they didn’t meet Stockwell’s increasingly stringent and somewhat arbitrary criteria. This left 107 studies, but there was still work to do. ... In his commen…
Comment linking /p/cherry-picking-the-evidence-on-alcohol
on “Alcohol Researcher Says Alcohol-Industry Lobbyists Are Attacking His Work”If you want another view on the study: https://snowdon.substack.com/p/the-minimum-pricing-salvage-j...
Comment linking /p/the-minimum-pricing-salvage-job
on “Study: Scotland’s minimum pricing linked to 13% drop in alcohol-related deaths”