Is drinking wine in moderation good for health or not?

Drinking alcoholic beverages is associated with various health effects in the population. Generally speaking, the evidence from epidemiological studies suggest that moderate alcohol intake is associated with a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular events, such as myocardial infarction; the risk of cancer, on the other hand, tends to rise; whether an increase in the incidence of cancer is observed also in association with moderate consumption levels is yet not definitively ascertained. All these effects seem primarily to be associated with the amount of alcohol consumed; the role of the different alcoholic beverages, and of their minor components, in this regard is in fact not clearly defined. Due to the opposite direction of the association between alcohol consumption and cardiovascular and cancer events, the association with all-cause mortality is complex, and J-shaped, with a consumption window theoretically associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality, up to 25 g alcohol per day. However, this issue is the subject of intense scientific debate.
The authors of a review published in the European Heart Journal state that the health effects of alcohol consumption are articulated and different when the associations with cardiovascular diseases or cancer is considered. Within the limits of the so-called moderate consumption, the association with a reduced cardiovascular risk seems to prevail over the increase in neoplastic risk, with the consequence that all-cause mortality is reduced as compared to abstainers, according to the previously described J-shaped conformation.
It is currently not possible to decide with certainty whether the consumption of the different alcoholic beverages and in particular that of wine, has specific health effects, different from those of the other alcohol beverages. In the literature studies that support, or instead deny, this hypothesis can be found.
Since the effects of alcohol intake are to some extent different from person to person, or from country to country, consumption recommendations addressed to the entire population, which do not take these differences into account, are likely inaccurate; ‘tailor-made’ indications, based on the clinical, genetic, metabolic, socio-economic situation of individuals, would be preferable.
The widely shared consensus that no one should start drinking alcoholic beverages for health reasons should in any case not be forgotten.
Source: Andrea Poli, Is drinking wine in moderation good for health or not?, European Heart Journal Supplements, Volume 24, Issue Supplement_I, November 2022, Pages I119–I122