Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It - NYTimes.com

I have wondered about this a great deal. Glad to see it finally get some press:

Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It - NYTimes.com:

"...some scientists, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.

“The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”"