Whether you were listening to teachers raving about the salad they had for lunch (in pointed opposition to your fish and chips), family friends boasting of their success intermittent fasting, or people on TV rambling about a juice cleanse, there was one thing to know about food and drink in the noughties and 2010s – adults couldn’t stop talking about it. But while most fads lost favour as quickly as they had found it, there was one diet that adults around me seemed never to grow tired of – the Mediterranean diet. It’s not hard to see why. Who doesn’t love a vine-ripened tomato (me - tomatoes are disgusting) or a bowl of olives garnished with a sprig of rosemary no one is going to eat? If it weren’t so bloody expensive, I could guzzle extra virgin olive oil at every meal and of course the icing (drizzle of lemon) on the cake is that an accompanying glass of red wine would be part and parcel of the menu.

The idea that there are health benefits to the kind of moderate alcohol consumption allowed for by the Mediterranean diet has always (that is, since I started drinking) been music to my ears. Better still, it has found encouragement in what seems like countless studies, often resulting in the conclusion that the occasional drink supports longevity. It is upon hearing things like this that I bask in the knowledge that you cannot argue with science.

“A growing body of research is calling into question whether drinking, even moderately, can ever be considered healthy”

Except, apparently you can. Debate about scientific pluralism aside, a growing body of research is calling into question whether whetting one’s whistle can ever be considered healthy. In July, The Guardian reported on the findings of a meta-analysis (a pooling of the results of multiple studies addressing similar research questions) on the association between alcohol consumption and mortality carried out by Canadian scientists. The researchers found that confounding variables often muddied the conclusions of the 107 studies they were considering. The error was clear and widespread: teetotallers who had made the decision to quit alcohol due to other health complications had been included in the abstainer groups. Already suffering from other conditions, they brought the average health down and made it seem like not drinking at all was worse for you than enjoying the occasional tipple. Clearly the scientists behind these studies had missed out on Biology A-level, otherwise they’d have been well aware, say it with me, that ‘correlation does not equal causation’.

“The days of believing that alcohol has a positive contribution to our health are well and truly over”

Lately, Tiktok and Instagram Reels have enjoyed an influx of new content: people dancing to Charli XCX’s apple and tutorials on how to be “very demure” come to mind. Videos concerned with health and nutrition seem also to be increasing in frequency. Earlier this month, a clip warning of the degenerative effects of alcohol consumption on the brain showed up on my explore page. Alcohol, then, is experiencing a serious marketing problem – it is not just being claimed that there is no benefit to a glass of wine, but that such a glass is actively bad for us. Social media is of course a breeding ground for misinformation. It is important to ask, do such claims stand up to scientific scrutiny?

There is an underwhelming amount of research on the effects of moderate alcohol consumption. Understandably, demonstrating the health consequences of heavy drinking has been the priority for most of alcohol research’s history. A study featured in Nature in 2022, however, found that even in individuals “consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units” the structure of the brain suffers. Such negative associations are stronger as alcohol consumption increases, but unlike much previous research, the study did not find a sweet spot of occasional drinking. It offers, as an example, the comparison between 50-year-olds who drink two units a day and those who have just one. The “associated changes in the brain” between the two groups “are equivalent to ageing two years”. Further research is no doubt required before such conclusions can be considered robust, especially because once again these results come into conflict with earlier literature, but recent studies seem to be in agreement: the days of believing that alcohol has a positive or even neutral contribution to our health are well and truly over.

It has already been noted that Generation Z drink less than those who came before us. Our innate sober-curiosity is perhaps stifled at Cambridge, where society events thrive off of the allure of something fizzy to attract attendees and C-Sunday seems to encourage getting as sloshed as humanly possible. At the very least, those of us who drink can celebrate being upfront about our alcohol consumption. Perhaps one day we will learn the trick of abstinence... or make the informed decision not to bother. After all, they say life is for living (not obsessing over your diet). For those who disagree, it is time to head back to the drawing board – good luck finding another way to excuse being quite so liberal with vino because the Mediterranean diet won’t do it for you anymore.