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An article by Stanton Peele makes the case that there is strong evidence that reasonable levels of drinking are healthy, and if fact beneficial to your health compared with abstinence.
For all levels of drinking, including the highest one, for both men and women, death rates did not reach those for abstainers.
[...] Of course, abstainers may not drink because they are already ill. Thus the meta-analysis relied on studies that eliminated subjects who are abstaining due to illness, or else contrast drinkers with lifetime abstainers.
There isn't a list of references in the article, but this study may be one of the supporting ones: Alcohol Dosing and Total Mortality in Men and Women: An Updated Meta-analysis of 34 Prospective Studies.
There are, no doubt, reasonable criticisms that can be made, but there does seem to be a case for saying that drinking some alcohol is beneficial.
Article also published in: Pacific Standard Magazine
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 28 2014, @07:29PM
I've always been skeptical of claims that drinking small quantities of alcohol is healthy. The wine industry always seems to be backing studies that show wine is healthy. Sometimes beer companies chime in with a health claim or two about beer. And while I think there's something to that, I wonder. Is it the grapes that make wine healthy, not the alcohol? Is grape juice healthier than wine?
Somewhat addressed by the article:
Resveratrol. Don’t get me started on resveratrol, a supplement based on an antioxidant found in the skin of red grapes which, in early studies done in test tubes and with animals, was proposed to account for the heart-healthy benefits of wine. I identified this claim as bullshit from the start. It was simply a way to avoid recognizing that alcohol is good for you by claiming instead that alcohol’s benefits are due to some other ingredient. I was thus beside myself when research conducted at Johns Hopkins finding that resveratrol has no significant impact on lifespan or heart disease, led to nonsequitur headlines like this one: “Sorry! Red Wine isn’t good for you after all.” (It was never red wine to start with, but beverage alcohol!)