I was just reading a thing about this the other day.

For decades, scientists told people that 1 to 2 drinks per day is better for your health than 0 drinks per day. They determined this by asking a ton of people how much they drank, and then asking about their health repeatedly over a long period of time. And they found what they called a J-curve. Basically when they plotted drinks per day vs health over time, people who had 0 drinks per day actually had slightly worse health outcomes than the 1-2 crowd.

So everybody agreed that light drinking was better than no drinking. This became guidance from governments, it got repeated on the news all the time, and it was a huge boon for the alcohol industry.

However, in recent years, scientists went back to take a closer look at this J-curve, and they noticed an obvious thing that wasn't accounted for initially: some people who don't drink have existing health conditions that prevent them from drinking. And some people that don't drink are in recovery: they'd spent decades being heavy drinkers and just didn't drink now. But damage had been done, and worse health outcomes were to be expected.

Once scientists started to correct for these cases, the J-curve disappeared. Not drinking at all was suddenly clearly the safest thing for longterm health outcomes. So that's been the new guidance coming down from agencies and health organizations.

That said, the difference in risk between 0 drinks per day and 2 drinks per day is significantly less than the difference between 2 drinks per day and 5 drinks per day. It's riskier than not drinking, but we do plenty of risky shit because it's fun or easy or convenient. See: driving, flying, eating fast food, etc. So, yes, a complete ascetic chasing immortality may not want to drink, but for most people occasional light drinking is an acceptable risk.

Edit: Autocorrect-induced typo