“With the exception of smoking and lung cancer, this is probably the most established association in the field of nutrition,” said Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “There are probably at least 100 studies by now.”

Alcohol is believed to reduce coronary disease because it has been found to increase the “good” HDL cholesterol and have anti-clotting effects.

Other benefits have been suggested, too. A study in China found that cognitively impaired elderly patients who drank in moderation did not deteriorate as quickly as abstainers.

A report from the Framingham Offspring Study found that moderate drinkers had greater mineral density in their hipbones than non-drinkers.

Researchers have reported that light drinkers are less likely than abstainers to develop diabetes and that those with Type 2 diabetes who drink lightly are less likely to develop coronary heart disease.

But the studies comparing moderate drinkers with abstainers have come under fire in recent years. Critics ask: Who are these abstainers? Why do they avoid alcohol? Is there something that makes them more susceptible to heart disease? Some researchers suspect the abstainer group may include “sick quitters,” people who stopped drinking because they already had heart disease.

In 2006, shortly after Fillmore and her colleagues published a critical analysis saying a vast majority of the alcohol studies they reviewed were flawed, Dr R Curtis Ellison, a Boston University physician who has championed the benefits of alcohol, hosted a conference on the subject. There, scientists had reached a “consensus” that moderate drinking “has been shown to have predominantly beneficial effects on health.”

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