A decision by the Trump administration to drop specific alcohol consumption recommendations from U.S. dietary guidelines has prompted pushback from researchers who believe any alcohol intake is unhealthy. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo
A decision by the Trump administration to drop long-standing recommendations that adults should have no more than two drinks per day for optimal health has sparked a backlash among researchers, who claim the best available evidence shows any amount of alcohol is harmful.
The researchers and public health advocates are pushing back after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and other administration officials rolled out the latest version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is updated every five years.
Kennedy said that under his “Make America Healthy Again” policies at HHS, the 2025-2030 dietary guidelines for food consumption favor “common sense, science-driven advice” rather than “favored corporate interests” in prioritizing “high-quality protein, healthy fats, fruits, vegetables and whole grains — and avoiding highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates.”
But while his revisions to the familiar “food pyramid” may have been expected, given his long-standing crusades against ultra-processed foods produced by some of the country’s biggest corporations, the updates provided a surprise about alcohol consumption.
Those revisions included the elimination of long-standing specific recommendations on the daily intake of alcoholic drinks, removal of the definition of a “standard drink” and omitting guidance that people under age 21 should not consume alcohol.
For years, the U.S. dietary guidelines have urged Americans to limit themselves when consuming alcohol. The expiring guidelines, for instance, recommended one drink or fewer daily for women and two drinks or fewer for men for optimal health.
The latest version, however, substitutes looser language, such as “consume less alcohol for better overall health” and “limit beverages,” without recommending clear levels.
The guidelines also mention broad groups of people who should “completely avoid alcohol” or be “mindful of alcohol consumption.”
Dr. Oz: Alcohol is a ‘social lubricant’
“Alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together,” Oz said at the Jan. 7 White House press conference announcing the updates.
“In the best-case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.”
Oz noted that “around the world where people live the longest, alcohol is sometimes part of their diet — again, small amounts, taken very judiciously and usually in a celebratory fashion.
“There is alcohol in these dietary guidelines, but the implication is don’t have it for breakfast. This should be something done in a small amount, with hopefully some kind of an event that may have alcohol added,” Oz said.
He added, “The general move away from two glasses for men, one glass for women — there was never really good data to support that quantity of alcohol consumption. That data was probably primarily confused with broader data about social connectedness.”
Experts and researchers contacted by UPI. dispute Oz’s contention that “there was never really good data to support” specific limits.
“Research has long shown that alcohol consumption carries health risks,” said Deepa Handu, senior scientific director for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
“While some earlier studies suggested that drinking small or moderate amounts might be linked to lower all-cause mortality and lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared with never drinking, these potential benefits were often emphasized more than the risks,” she said.
Dueling studies disagree on alcohol limits; One is shelved
Handu noted that in 2024, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, or NASEM, conducted a systematic review at the request of Congress to examine alcohol recommendations for new dietary guidelines.
That report agreed with positions long held by the alcohol industry — namely that low-to-moderate drinking, when compared with never drinking, is safe and may well be linked to lower “all-cause mortality” and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, although at the same time associated with an increase in breast and colorectal cancer risk.
The NASEM report suggested that alcohol intake “should be viewed as a continuum: higher consumption increases the risk across all outcomes, including overall mortality and cardiovascular disease,” Handu said. “In other words, the more a person drinks, the greater potential harm to their health.”
The lead author of the NASEM report, Dr. Ned Calonge, associate dean for public health practice at the Colorado School of Public Health in Denver, wrote in a commentary last year that due to the reams of conflicting evidence, it’s impossible to ascertain the potential risks or benefits of regularly consuming one to two drinks of alcohol per day.
At the same time, he concluded there also isn’t enough evidence to support the idea that moderate drinking will actually improve one’s health.
Those findings, however, were mild compared with the results of a separate government study launched under the Biden administration in 2023. Called the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, it warned that even one drink a day boosts the risk of liver cirrhosis, oral and esophageal cancers and injuries.
Rather than considering all-cause mortality as the NASEM report did, it instead looked specifically at alcohol consumption and health outcomes “with a focus on alcohol-related mortality and morbidity,” Handu noted.
“Results from the report indicate that even low levels of alcohol increase the risk of death from alcohol-related conditions, including cancer, liver disease and injuries,” she said.
HHS, however, withdrew that study in September in the run-up to the publication of the new dietary guidelines.
The move came after the Republican majority on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched a probe of the report, calling it duplicative and “a biased study that concluded under a ‘Canadian model’ that no amount of alcohol consumption is safe by recruiting scientists who would develop the research that supported that conclusion.”
Its lead author defended its findings, saying they illustrate how thinking on the dangers of even small amounts of alcohol are becoming more clear, thanks to advances in computing power.
Those advances allow researchers to vastly improve on the accuracy of broad all-cause mortality analyses, said Kevin Shield, a senior scientist at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
“We can now model, using computers, all-cause mortality by synthesizing data from studies of diseases with established causal relationships to alcohol, weighting these risk estimates by cause-specific mortality in the United States,” he told UPI. “That eliminates these biases [in all-cause mortality studies].”
Some convinced any alcohol intake is harmful
Shield’s study found that among males who consumed just one drink per week, their lifetime risk of an alcohol-attributable cancer was 5.6 per 1,000 people, while among those who had one drink per day the figure rose to 8.2 per 1,000 people.
For females, it was 2.6 per 1,000 people for one drink per week, and 19.5 per 1,000 for one drink per day.
Others similarly contend the preponderance of scientific evidence has definitively swung in favor of the view that any amount of alcohol is harmful, and that it should be reflected in official guidance.
That shift in thinking “reflects better and more comprehensive science,” said Tiffany Hall, president and CEO of Recover Alaska and board chairman of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, a nonprofit group dedicated to minimizing risks associated with alcohol use.
“Earlier studies often focused on narrow outcomes, like heart disease, without accounting for alcohol’s effects across the body or fully controlling for confounding factors,” she told UPI.
“Newer research looks at the total health impact, including cancer and premature death, and shows that risk begins at low levels — with breast cancer risk increasing at just one drink per day for women and substantially higher mortality risk at two drinks per day for men.
“As methods have improved and conflicts of interest have received greater scrutiny, the idea that alcohol provides a net health benefit no longer holds up.”
Hall called the withdrawal of the Alcohol Intake and Health Study an example of “political interference” by federal officials sympathetic to the “trillion-dollar” alcohol industry, depriving the public of information that gives “clear and transparent information about the health risks of alcohol.”
The removal of the specific drink guidelines from the new dietary guidelines “matters because people rely on these guidelines — medical professionals, reporters, policymakers, and advocates — to communicate risk clearly,” she added.
“When specificity is stripped away, it doesn’t reduce harm; it creates confusion. At a time when fewer Americans are drinking, the guidelines missed an opportunity to provide honest, science-based clarity,” Hall said.
“Instead, the outcome preserves ambiguity in a way that aligns more closely with industry interests than with public health.”
