Mod­er­ate alco­hol intake has long been lauded as an ingre­di­ent of the healthy lifestyle; being good for your heart and your longevity.

Accord­ing to a grow­ing num­ber of vocal psy­chol­o­gists, how­ever, stud­ies show­ing health ben­e­fits from mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion are purely cor­re­la­tory and any advice com­ing from them should be taken with cau­tion.

From an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Prevention:

The bot­tom line is there has not been a sin­gle study done on mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion and mor­tal­ity out­comes that is a ‘gold stan­dard’ kind of study — the kind of ran­dom­ized con­trolled clin­i­cal trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal agent in this country.

[Mod­er­ate drinkers and abstain­ers] are so dif­fer­ent that they sim­ply can­not be com­pared. Mod­er­ate drinkers are health­ier, wealth­ier and more edu­cated, and they get bet­ter health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being.

In fact, even the orig­i­nal researcher whose “land­mark study [found] that mem­bers of the Kaiser Per­ma­nente health care plan who drank in mod­er­a­tion were less likely to be hos­pi­tal­ized for heart attacks than abstain­ers” has since dis­cov­ered that even mod­er­ate alco­hol con­sump­tion may increase hyper­ten­sion.