The Trump and Biden campaigns recently sparred over whether the government should tell people to lay off red meat. But a new proposal could see the Trump administration hit men with equally unpopular and unscientific advice later this year. A proposal being considered by the administration would change the United States’s definition of “moderate drinking,” telling men to have no more than one alcoholic drink on any given day.
If the proposal succeeds, the U.S. will be the latest country to allow anti-alcohol activists to overturn decades of evidence showing that people who drink moderately live longer than those who drink no alcohol at all. Moderate drinking, currently defined as up to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women, has a particularly strong protective effect against heart disease, which remains America’s biggest killer.
A concerted international push to drive drinking guidelines to near-zero drinks has already manifested itself in the United Kingdom and Australia, where drinking guidelines were narrowed in 2016 and 2019 on the basis of academic modeling rather than actual health data. Documents obtained under the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act showed that Public Health England pushed researchers to design a new model without scientific justification when its first attempt did not produce the desired results. When the Australian government commissioned the same team, its model was used to justify even stricter guidelines than those adopted in the U.K.
As with the earlier British and Australian reviews, the “scientific” report seeking to justify this new proposal in the U.S. makes every effort to cast doubt on the well-established benefits of moderate drinking. In each case, the activist-academics driving the reviews gave absolute credence to evidence of harm and portrayed evidence of any protective effects as shaky and speculative. Britain’s chief medical officer even went as far as to describe the benefits of moderate drinking as “an old wives’ tale” despite decades of unshakable evidence to the contrary.
This eagerness to discredit moderate drinking stems not from science but from a persistent strain of anti-alcohol ideology. Anti-alcohol campaigners and academics would prefer people not drink at all, and many in the new temperance movement would like to see tobacco-style regulations applied to alcohol. For these hard-liners, the well-known benefits of moderate drinking are only a barrier on the road to a new prohibition.
Only one member of the U.S. review committee has a background in research directly related to alcohol. Long prior to his participation on the committee, Dr. Timothy Naimi of Boston University argued that “national drinking guidelines should no longer assume any protective effects from low dose consumption.” He has authored multiple studies casting doubt on the evidence about moderate drinking, of which no fewer than eight are cited in the committee’s report.
Although the report acknowledges that men who consume two drinks a day tend to live longer than those who don’t drink at all, the authors say that even greater health benefits exist for men who consume one drink per day or less. The implication is that the guideline should be dropped to one drink per day.
The evidence for this is far from solid, but even if it were proven that one drink is better than two, it would point to an optimal level of drinking, not simply a safe one. It would also require the government to tell nondrinkers to become light drinkers. And yet, the committee argues quite vehemently that alcohol is inherently dangerous, and the U.S. will maintain its advice that those who do not drink alcohol should not begin to drink for any reason.
Convention and common sense dictate that it is more “safe” to drink alcohol at a level that does not increase mortality than to not drinking alcohol at all. This is how alcohol guidelines have been set around the world for decades.
Safe levels of moderate alcohol consumption, consistent with the current U.S. definition, have been repeatedly confirmed by a wealth of epidemiological evidence. There is no scientific reason to change the U.S. guidelines. The proposal to do so is based on dogma, nothing more.
Christopher Snowdon is the head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He is the author of The Art of Suppression, The Spirit Level Delusion, and Velvet Glove, Iron Fist. His work focuses on pleasure, prohibition, and dodgy statistics.
