Alcohol cannot be dismissed as doing us no 'good' at all

Last week I stumbled on a report that concluded no amount of alcohol is good for your health if you are under 40.

- HARRY READHEAD

If you are over 40, the report said, then a small amount might do you some good. (Thank God: only nine years to go, I thought. Oh God: nine years to go, I thought shortly after.)

The verdict on the study in question was clear: we should all seriously consider abstaining from alcohol. I quote the senior author of the study: "Our message is simple: young people should not drink."

Now, as relieved as I was to find myself included, at the age of 31, in the category marked "young", I found all this a bit vexing. In fact, I still find it vexing. What I quarrel with is the suggestion that because alcohol does not toughen up our hearts or scrape clean the walls of our arteries, as we used to think it did, it is not at all "good" for us. It is harmful to our bodies and so, the thinking runs, it is no good at all.

But it seems to me that this definition of "good" is far too narrow. The perspective taken is too isolated. To put it a slightly different way, I felt that the researchers had not taken the whole context of a person's life into account. And context is everything.