Thanks to the Give Up The Hooch thread, I look pretty closely now at any research supporting benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.
As a former wine every day drinker, I felt rather reassured by being taught in a med school cardiology course that a drink a day was protective.
Kind of funny since no one in my family has ever had heart disease, but a lot of them have had alcoholism...hmm
However, it's really, really worthwhile to look at the populations they use for non drinkers. Are they never drinkers or are they anyone who claims to abstain from alcohol, because the latter group is heavily weighted by former problem drinkers and people with pre-existing health issues that prevent them from drinking. Ie, people more likely to die younger.
A lot of these studies are very good studies that probably suggest not so much that drinking moderately makes people more healthy, but that being more healthy tends to correlate with drinking very moderately.
Think about it, most people in our society, even the extremely health conscious, tend to drink at least a little bit. That leaves very few people to be total abstainers, and that population is virtually guaranteed to be riddled with confounders.
The never drinkers also tend to be confounded because a lot of them are part of particular cultural groups, which makes them less representative as a cross section of the population.
When moderate drinkers make up the overwhelming vast majority of the healthy population, it's really hard to objectively study their moderate drinking in isolation because they muscle out a decent control group.
