Alcohol has virtually no positive health benefits. Ethanol is potently toxic and will cause DNA damage throughout your body and kill a number of other cells in the way.
But alcohol consumption is ridiculously evolutionarily beneficial. The ability to digest ethanol has evolved independently twice, and each time it swept to dominate ~95 percent of the population in less than 500 years.
It is an energy income method, albeit not the best. In reasonable amounts it strengthens social bonds in group. And there might be few more. There ya go. Wanna grab a beer?
Downvote? Cute, does that equate to social pressure to consume ethanol?
Any alcohol consumption increases the incidence of multiple types of cancers, the primary metabilite (ethanal/acetaldehyde) causes damage to DNA.
I can bond with people over my passion for the sciences, I prefer to avoid increasing my risk of cancers. No NMDA antagonist needed.
"The evidence indicates that the more alcohol a person drinks—particularly the more alcohol a person drinks regularly over time—the higher his or her risk of developing an alcohol-associated cancer. Even light drinkers (those who have no more than one drink per day) and binge drinkers have a modestly increased risk of some cancers (3–7). Based on data from 2009, an estimated 3.5% of cancer deaths in the United States (about 19,500 deaths) were alcohol related (8)."
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
