Yes, the verdict on beer and health is all over the place. Seems like it'll help if you want to keep your ticker going so that you have a better chance of facing that cancer it cause. If that's important to you, well, beer may be your drink. It's hard to figure out what you are supposed to think. You never really know what the life lesson is from any of this stuff. And this is maybe the most bedeviling bit of medical research yet:

The finding "raises the intriguing possibility" that giving alcohol to brain injured patients may improve outcome, the study team suggests in the Archives of Surgery. Alcohol and driving "is and will always continue to be bad -- it contributes to over 40 percent of traffic-related fatalities," first author Dr. Ali Salim of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles emphasized in an email to Reuters Health. "However, of those patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury who survive their initial insult, those with alcohol in their system seem to have a slight survival advantage compared to those without alcohol in their system," Salim noted.

So, good news for those with designated drivers? Plan ahead on a long term basis? Or fluke of the numbers that in the end you can't do much with? After all - "...the lower death rate among the drinkers was "tempered" by an apparent increase in complications for patients who had been drinking before the accident, the investigators note." Helpful that. Very helpful.