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I tried to find my answer with their document, but the search interface is awful.

Can anyone tell if this factors in the confounder of the very-sick or chronically ill often being teetotalers, so making the "never drink" category look worse for reasons unrelated to any supposed benefits of alcohol consumption? It's my understanding that was supposed to explain prior findings like this.

I looked at the referenced study. This a meta-analysis and the number of studies contributing to the findings in each section appears to be rather low (2-8 studies in the sections I looked at), although the sample sizes of some of the studies are large.

The main thing that jumps out at me is that in most cases the moderate drinker comparison groups were, as they say, "at the lower end of moderate alcohol consumption". Their example (in the section on all-cause mortality): "five of the eight studies compared an average of about 0.7 U.S. drinks/day (8.4 g/d) with never consuming alcohol". So this is comparing the difference between teetotalers and people who drank very little. Although definitions of "moderate drinking" can allow up to 2 drinks a day, they had no findings comparing the effects of abstinence vs. consumption at the higher end of that range.

The meta-analysis is pretty formulaic and a lot of text in the main chapters is boilerplate. This isn't a bad thing as it can indicate a systematic approach not tempted by fishing expeditions, but it does mean the ultimate findings are only a tiny portion of the size of the document. To my eye most of the effects appear rather moderate.

This is an area I've been reading up on lately and it's rather fascinating to me that there seems to still be so much uncertainty about this question, given its obvious relevance to public health. I wonder if we'll ever see a durable conclusion on this matter.

It’s seems to me that the current “alcohol is bad” messaging coming from health podcasters and influencers (including Andrew Huberman) will be proven wrong in the long term.

Virtually nothing that humans have consumed for thousands of years has been proven to be bad for you after further research. Virtually nothing. The idea that we invented alcohol then consumed it for thousands of years by mistake is ridiculous. It’s like when eggs were bad for you because of cholesterol.

It’s preposterous, and it comes from the excessive focus on measurable outcomes coming from medical testing.

It’s like my neurologist once told me, after a scare, that I was a victim of VOMIT. I asked him what the heck was that - he said Victim of Modern Imaging Technology.

Huberman (etc) are likely following the same pattern. They saw a pattern in the data saying “alcohol is bad”.

What could be better for a health obsessed person? We know alcohol has bad effects, we know alcoholism is a problem. Let’s just say it’s all a problem.

But… Living in a Southern European country, it’s ridiculous. We don’t have the same rates of alcoholism as northern countries, and from that pov, Huberman’s Puritanism just sounds absurd. From that perspective, alcohol is just a mild sedative, with wonderful antidepressant effects.

Seems silly.

What does "tied" mean in this headline? One presumes correlation rather than causation. https://xkcd.com/552

These reports only make sense to me if I take a "substitution model" in mind. My idea being that it is not likely that alcohol itself is healthy, but there are some pretty good feedback loops that prevent people from drinking too much alcohol that don't really exist for many of the replacement drinks.

As such, many people that drink "moderately" also drink less of all things. Often times, their "one drink with dinner" is all they drink, period. Contrasted to the bottomless soda drinks that are also on offer.

Granted, I'm still not clear I have internalized my few trips to other countries. I had assumed people would drink more water. I was, evidently, very wrong. It is still puzzling to me how little water I was able to get on the regular when out.