Many negative effects of alcohol may stem from disruptions in sleep and gut microbiome.

“Alcohol is changing for the worst the gut microbiome and sleep patterns we know this people that track their sleep they have one drink and they're like holy cow my sleep is so much worse not just sleep score but amount of REM sleep amount of Deep Sleep Etc is that the direct or indirect cause of any kind of disruption in brain structure or in neuronal health we don't know but what these larger scale studies show is that if you look at the amount of gray matter thinning which occurs with age regardless gray matter being the neurons in the brain white matter being the fiber tracts um the axons and myelin in the brain is how they're imaged so they show up it's gray or white the amount of gray matter thinning starts to increase as you get out past two drinks per week”

“a lot of the so-called negative effects of alcohol are due to disruptions in sleep and gut microbiome so those are indirect”