One word: humanities.

That just sounds really unlikely. Got anything to back that up?

The overall risk curve for alcohol is J shaped. In other words, your total morbidity risk decreases sharply with moderate consumption but then increases after about two drinks a day. Interestingly, risk of heart disease is lower even among the heaviest drinkers. However, total morbidity rates are higher because of other risks.

I'm prepared to believe that there's health benefits to a small amount of alcohol every day, but I really can't imagine it being anything on the scale of the health benefits of not-being-morbidly-obese. Morbid obesity is a huge risk factor for just about everything.

You see plenty of 90-year-old teetotallers, but not many morbidly obese folks past their fifties.

That's true, but then again people also naturally lose weight as they got older. Lower testosterone causes muscles to atrophy, and reduced sense of smell leads to a loss of appetite. I'm not sure how many morbidly obese people live long enough to get to this point, but it's at least worth considering.

As the Bible says, "A little wine for the stomach's sake" and "brandy to give you cheer."

I would think the real damage of teetotalism would be the stress involved in constantly thinking about and addressing it. Not so much the lack of the substance in the body.

* The debate whether alcoholism is a disease, a personality trait, or something else entirely is irrelevant here.

The health benefits of alcohol are an unusual case, also -- many of its benefits are related to other chemicals that frequently accompany it, such as polyphenols in red wine. This does not apply to "LSD/Cocaine/Heroine" (sic), though there are comparable benefits for coffee and tea (particularly green tea), mostly antioxidants.

Many doctors are reluctant to recommend moderate drinking for its health benefits because it is also addictive and impairs judgment, and in cases where people drink excessively, the health costs are severe. This doesn't apply to most things recommended for health (exercise, eating fruits and vegetables, getting enough sleep, nethack, green tea, pomegranate juice (or whatever the health craze of the moment is, ac,ai berries? peach fuzz?)), because most of those are less likely to be taken to excess, and would probably be several orders of magnitude less harmful even if they were.

Then you would be wrong: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E05EED9143FF...

For many people moderate drinking has absolutely no benefit at all, Dr. Klatsky said. This applies to all adolescents: teenagers have a negligible risk of heart disease and for them the risks of heavy drinking vastly outweigh any benefits of moderate drinking.

The same generally applies to men under 40 and women under 50, except for those with known heart disease risks. Pregnant women, people with liver disease, known drinking problems or a family history of alcoholism should never be advised to begin to drink for their health, he said.

But for others with known coronary heart disease or a risk of heart disease because of obesity, cholesterol levels, or smoking, moderate alcohol use may be a way to reduce that risk.

It is important to look at context when reading about these sorts of studies.