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"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