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It's not a triviality. The background is that there have been quite a few studied published which claimed that drinking moderately had health benefits over not

It's not a triviality. The background is that there have been quite a few studied published which claimed that drinking moderately had health benefits over not drinking at all (you see those headlines every now and then, "a glass of wine/week reduces risk of heart attack", or whatever). The statistics behind those studies are a bit dodgy, because they investigate just one disease (heart attacks, say) instead of total health effect, and because they are confounded by people who are tee-totalers because they were alcoholics (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-give-me-breast-cancer/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-gi...). But many people say that they have a big negative impact on public health, because they allow people to rationalize their drinking---instead of thinking it's unhealthy they can go "oh, but it's good for my heart".

raffael-vogler 8y ago
As far as I know those studies have been falsified by at least one large meta-study (f.x. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26997174 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26997174) which revealed that those studies (showing benefits of moderate alcohol consumption) are based on a sampling bias. Those studies compare a group N of people who never drink with a group O of people who occasionally drink. Group N usually shows slightly more health issues than group O - hence the conclusion. But the problem is simply that there are reasons why people decide to abstain completely from alcohol. And those reasons are often health issues or problems with alcohol in the past. From that angle it is a triviality. Alcohol is mildly toxic to almost all organs - of course maximizing health will be achieved by avoiding it entirely.