Not the first one of its kind but pretty large sample.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20636661

Here's a study showing that drinking a little alcohol lowers your chance of having liver cirrhosis compared to drinking no alcohol.

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/add.13627

Here's the criticism.

> We would like to add to her discussion of the significance of former and occasional drinker biases in this literature and highlight how they can cause both overestimation of cardioprotection and underestimation of cancer risks across the whole drinking continuum. The underlying theory here is that, as a population ages, a selection bias operates whereby individuals with poorer health are more likely to cut down or stop drinking completely. Such individuals are often still classified as ‘abstainers’ and used as a reference against which all current drinkers are compared. In simple terms, they make drinkers at all levels of consumption ‘look good’ by comparison.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26997174

Guys above then adjust for the mistake. The benefits disappear. Mortality risk grows as alcohol consumption increases. Yeah, there are people with protective genes, but on a population scale, recommending to go from 0 to N glasses of alcoholic beverage a day is insane.

I have personally increased my alcohol consumption, which was obviously dumb, given that the data was flawed. After this study I don't think I'll have more than couple of drinks per year.