title_body: What possible health benefits are there with drinking alcohol in moderation?
upvoted_answer: This might sound strange on alcohol.SE, but &quot;to thine own self be true&quot;.
  Studies that show that not drinking is less healthy do it because the &quot;teetotalers&quot; are, often enough, former alcoholics.
  Skeptics SE has several threads about the &quot;benefits&quot; of moderate drinking:
  
  Is alcohol beneficial in small amounts?
  Is a glass of red wine a day beneficial for the heart?
  
  This article by The Guardian examines the flaws of those studies that show moderate drinking to be beneficial:
  
  Never drinkers are also different in a lot of ways, mostly bad, which
  makes sense if you think about the why people might choose to abstain
  from drinking – for example, illness, poverty, and previous
  alcoholism.
  
  The article also reviews a couple of recent studies that show that moderate alcohol consumption is not beneficial.