Kylix _ wrote:

> Could it be that the reason alcohol seems to have
> health benefits is because some populations have
> adapted to it? 

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. And I'm saying further that we are
adapted to small amounts of alcohol because it has been present in small
amounts in the human diet for millions of years, even longer than animal
foods. The ancestors of the first hominids also likely consumed alcohol from
fermenting fruits prevalent in the African jungles. Alcohol is not merely
paleo; it is, as someone else wrote, pre-paleo. 

So then it seems that alcohol is healthful in small amounts for the same
reason that any paleo food is healthful: the human genome evolved over
millions of years on a diet that contained it. The problem, of course, is
that modern people sometimes consume it in very large unhealthy amounts far
beyond what our genome expects. It is in this respect analogous to salt, as
someone else observed.

> Could it be that a similar study on a
> *non*-adapted population would not show any benefits? Has there been
> any such study? 

I think alcohol would actually be very poisonous to any population of humans
that was not adapted to it. However I don't think any population of humans
is not adapted to it. Certainly some populations are less well adapted to
alcohol than others but as far as I know the enzyme for its metabolism is
universal. I'm not aware of any studies that suggest otherwise.

-gts