Quote Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name View Post
Alcohol is still extremely toxic to humans and provides no benefit nutritionally or energetically to our body as far as I know. It's a poor example in my opinion. Millenia of drinking alcoholic products and we can at most tolerate around 200-250ml of alcohol in a short period (for 180lb males). A standard 12 fl oz (355ml) drink's worth of ethanol (about 23 standard drinks worth if I did my math right) would certainly kill anyone.

Meanwhile, I can drink half a gallon of milk in an hour if I wanted to with no real harm.

Other than that, I would agree with your concluding sentence.

Your thinking in terms of today when generally water in the West is safe to drink, back in the day People might often drank beer as a safer alternative to water. Remember these people probably didnt understand that boiling the water would purify it, but they knew fine well not to drink from the local river that was downstream of the local tannery.