My friend was picking up on a swing in the public-health messaging around alcohol.
For many years, she might have felt that she was making a healthy choice in having a glass of wine or a beer with dinner.
Right around the time when she came of legal age to drink, the early 1990s, some prominent researchers were promoting, and the media helped popularize, the idea that moderate drinking — for women, a drink a night; for men, two — was linked to greater longevity.
The cause of that association was not clear, but red wine, researchers theorized, might have anti-inflammatory properties that extended life and protected cardiovascular health.
More recently, though, research has piled up debunking the idea that moderate drinking is good for you.
Organizations:
Nature