Professor Dame Theresa Marteau seems to have something of an obsession about glasses and tableware. In the last ten years, she and her team at Cambridge university have carried out numerous experiments in the bars and restaurants of Cambridgeshire to see whether restricting the size of wine glasses reduces the amount of wine consumed. This has yielded a mixed bag of evidence. When they combined their findings in a ‘mega-analysis’ (sic) in 2020, they found a possible effect in restaurants but not in bars. Marteau nevertheless suggested that ‘regulating wine glass size is one option that might be considered for inclusion in local licensing regulations.’
Anyone who believes (wrongly) that alcohol is harmful in any quantity should not be involved in licensing regulations
If this seems like one of less important things that scientists could be doing, it should be noted that there is more to Marteau’s research than investigating wine glasses. She has also studied the impact of smaller plates on food consumption and the impact of smaller bottles on fizzy drink consumption. She has even turned her hand to history and shown that wine glasses have got larger in the last 300 years. It is no exaggeration to say that she is a towering figure in this field of research. You don’t get a damehood and a seat on Sage without making a powerful contribution to public health research.
And she is not done yet. With the help of a £3.1 million grant from the Wellcome Trust, Marteau and her team have turned their attention to serving sizes. In what they boast is the first study of its kind conducted in a real-world setting, they persuaded 21 pubs and bars to remove their largest wine serving (which was either 250 ml or 175 ml) from the menu and see what happened. As far as Marteau is concerned, the results were sensational. Although nine of the pubs awkwardly sold more wine after the change, there was an overall decline in daily wine sales of 7.6 per cent.
Is that a lot? Not really. It is a reduction of five units of alcohol per day. That would be significant if it was per person, but it is per pub. We don’t know how much their customers drank overall or if any of them decided to go to a different pub (we do know, however, that four of the pubs received complaints about the lack of large wine glasses). In any case, most wine is drunk in the home.
Marteau’s study admits that this is ‘a relatively small reduction’ but argues that restricting serving sizes, along with restricting the size of glasses, ‘merits consideration as part of alcohol licensing regulations’ because ‘no level of alcohol consumption is currently considered safe for health.’
Here I must disagree. Anyone who believes (wrongly) that alcohol is harmful in any quantity should not be involved in licensing regulations. They are unlikely to stop with wine glasses. Let us consider why Marteau believes that people drink more wine from large wine glasses. It is, she says, partly because larger wine glasses can ‘increase the pleasure from drinking wine’. When asked why people might order a large glass of wine rather than a small one, she said: ‘A 250ml glass of wine usually costs less than the cost of two 125 ml glasses. Value for money is therefore likely to be one factor.’ This seems to be confirmed in her latest study in which she and her team proudly note that the pubs which sold less wine ‘did not lose money’. Good news for the pubs, perhaps. Not such good news for their customers.
By her own account, Marteau’s research shows that people enjoy drinking out of large wine glasses and they get a better deal from ordering a large serving. To anyone interested in consumer wellbeing, this means that a large glass of wine is a jolly good thing. To the killjoys in ‘public health’ academia, however, the economic and social benefits of a large glass of wine mean that it is not only a bad thing but is such a bad thing that it should probably be banned.
This, in a nutshell, is what we are up against. There is an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of ‘public health’ and the interests of the public.
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