Is modest consumption of alcohol better for you than no alcohol at all? A contentious question, especially if you make wine. Observation of people who drink no alcohol reveals a few things:
1. they have somewhat higher mortality than those who drink moderately but:
2. a fair number of them gave up drinking because they were dying of cirrhosis or similar;
3. in some societies, you have to be pretty weird to be teetotal;
4. in other societies, #3 doesn't apply.
We can deal with #2 by restricting analysis to people who are healthy at baseline, but #3 and #4 are more tricky. (For those of you who like it technical, I'm talking about confounding.)
Here is a paper written a few years ago but I've only just come across it. Alcohol in Chinese populations is an interesting question. On the one hand, there is no tax or duty on wine and beer in Hong Kong (abolished 2008 to stimulate the wine trade). On the other hand, a mutation common in Chinese populations makes drinking alcohol a thoroughly unpleasant experience, even if it's Chateau Lafitte 1976: aldehyde dehydrogenase mutations result in the build up of acetaldehyde, headache, nausea, facial flushing, etc.
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