Jim, I agree with you and drinking in moderation has become a slippery slope.
Two drinks (REALLY 2 shots of alcohol - not MY version of a drink!). Used to be considered moderate. It now ranks as ‘heavy’ if you do it every day.
Can’t tell you how many times I filled out a health questionnaire in a doctor‘s office and it asked me how many drinks I had in a typical week. I would always put down 10 to 14, since those were drinks based on one shot of liquor or glasses of wine or beer. Never once did a doctor question that amount, suggest I should cut down or give any guidance at all.
Sadly, they were following guidelines that were influenced by the liquor lobby in the United States, who actually paid doctors to find people who drank higher amounts of alcohol, but had no diseases or illnesses. They did not ask how long people drank this amount of liquor, nor did they ask if they started or stopped at any point.
So if I was filling out a questionnaire today, I would say I drink zero alcohol, but I have had prostate and bladder cancer. So they would take this data and trumpet it across the media to show that someone who drinks NO alcohol whatsoever still gets prostate and bladder cancer. Therefore, alcohol has NO effect when it comes to these types of diseases since abstaining offers no advantage.
The famous wine study linking Resveratrol to heart health never mentioned that you would have to drink the equivalent of 10,000 bottles of wine in a single sitting to get the amount of resveratrol necessary to what’s the weather offer any cardiac benefit whatsoever. But they made that simple link and sales took off!!
Total deception and cherry picking to the extreme, but unfortunately many studies are carried out this way; these days you have to read an article and then spend a lot more time fact checking and figuring out how they came to the conclusions they did…sad indeed!
Phil