Does that research indicate if it's the health impacts of the alcohol, or the health impacts of the implied social network that is extending life expectancy? Or something else? Because I'll be perfectly honest, I have a hard time believing that someone who drinks a beer every day for years doesn't have a negative health impact over someone who didn't.
I have no trouble believing this. People who stop drinking die in under a week. Now, if want to convince me that regularly consuming a toxic drug (ethanol) has significant health benefits, we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. Go check the drunk driving statistics before you argue that alcohol promotes long life.
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I have trouble believing it because it doesn't meet the common sense test. The question was about one beer a day. Alcohol is a natural product of fermentation. All vertebrate species are equipped with a hepactic enzyme system allowing them to metabolize alcohol. Many animals seem to prefer and even seek out partially fermented fruit, including the pen-tailed tree shew, which eats mostly fermented nectar. The likely reason is that fermentation process makes nutrients more available for digestion.
Along those lines, humans throughout history and in all cultures deliberately ferment food and eaten it along the associated by-products. Bread, cheese, pickles, on and on, so it doesn't stand to reason that alcohol is the one fermented product we can't consume. And as witnessed by all the conflicting studies mentioned above, the effects of moderate to low alcohol consumption are so small, that it is impossible to even measure them with any reproducibility--which is to say, there likely aren't any.
Beer has plenty of flavonoids along with lots of available vitamins and minerals. It isn't like Coca-Cola with no nutritional value. Again, the question was about one beer a day. If you would have said six beers a day, then everyone would agree with you. But one? Doesn't pass the sniff test.
