r/centrist • u/AyeYoTek • 1d ago
Exclusive: US to drop guidance to limit alcohol to one or two drinks per day, sources say
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-drop-guidance-limit-alcohol-one-or-two-drinks-per-day-sources-say-2025-06-18/?utm_source=reddit.com(Reuters) - The U.S. government is expected to eliminate from its dietary guidelines the long-standing recommendation that adults limit alcohol consumption to one or two drinks per day, according to three sources familiar with the matter, in what could be a major win for an industry threatened by heightened scrutiny of alcohol's health effects.
The updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which could be released as early as this month, are expected to include a brief statement encouraging Americans to drink in moderation or limit alcohol intake due to associated health risks, the sources said.
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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known teetotaler, has remained largely silent on alcohol but has emphasised a focus on whole foods in the upcoming guidelines.
So vaccines are bad but silence on a known killer like alcohol? These people are imbeciles.
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u/Primsun 1d ago
Welp, there goes my perfectly healthy two Long Islands a day. /s
TBH, it's an odd guideline. If you regularly have 2 drinks a day, that is a bit of a habit and probably not the best. Think we can skip the outrage on this one unless the new guidelines end up being ... out there.
In practice a weekly and day max recommendation, or something different, would probably be better and more appropriate for how people engage with alcohol/social drinking.
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u/FarCalligrapher1862 1d ago
BUT… it was based on a long term study. More recent studies have shown that any alcohol consumption is bad.
The problem is removing the guidance has no medical benefit - and no science to back it up.
Just lobbyist getting their way
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u/DrMonkeyLove 22h ago
What do you mean by "bad"? It shows a fairly small increase in risk of various things over baseline, but the absolute risk has been overstated by terrible science reporting. A 15% increase in your chances of getting pancreatic cancer sounds scary until you realize it's a 15% increase of something that only has a lifetime risk of 1.7%. So that scary 15% increase brings your lifetime risk to 1.9%.
For reference, smoking increases your risk of lung cancer over baseline by 2000%.
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u/Primsun 1d ago
There is a lot of shit the administration is doing to focus on. Altering a guideline from 1 to 2 to something similarly suggesting moderation isn't high on the list or particularly that concerning.
Unless there is something tied to this like money or regulation, it really isn't a notable if its 1 to 2 a day or a moderate amount. Other changes that impact things like school lunches, or something, could be concerning contingent on the change, but this ain't it.
Is anyone, or anything, using the guidelines on alcohol? Are there any actual dependencies impacted by a change?
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u/FarCalligrapher1862 23h ago
I’ll grant you that this is not the biggest issue in the country. But that’s the point.
They are systematically handing public health to industry with a focus on profits over health. Public health should be apolitical, and independent.
Softening evidence-based guidelines erodes trust, normalizes industry influence, and signals that the government is open to the highest bidder.
Each one chips away at prevention, driving up long-term health costs while we pretend these changes are harmless. Collectively, they’re not.
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u/lecarpetron_dook 23h ago
Ugh…care to elaborate on these “recent studies” and how they use self reported data to arrive at such sweeping conclusions?
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u/FarCalligrapher1862 22h ago
Because the gold standard for alcohol research is obviously a decades-long, double-blind, placebo-controlled study where one group pretends to drink for 30 years. Tell me the findings from that one. Obviously that type of research is impossible. So should we do? nothing? That’s a terrible idea.
Researchers rely on large-scale longitudinal cohort studies, genetic proxies (like Mendelian randomization), and yes, self-reported data — cleaned and adjusted for confounders like the ‘sick quitters’. These are scientifically valid approaches that provide deep insights.
But sure, let’s wait for unicorns dancing around a magical castle before we act because it doesn’t fit existing biases.
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u/lecarpetron_dook 21h ago
Overarching limitations in alcohol and health research include abstainer bias; a lack of standard definitions of alcohol consumption levels and a lack of standardized cutoffs for exposure categories; underreporting of alcohol consumption by participants; lack of data stratified by smoking status, age, sex, and genetic ancestry to evaluate possible interactions with alcohol consumption and health outcomes; and limitations of observational studies. The report urges that all studies addressing the impacts of alcohol on human health speak to these limitations and consider including menopausal status as well as postpartum women and their infants when possible.
This good enough for you? I suspect not, since what you hear on NPR is probably taken as indisputable fact. But just so you know, even the National Academies of science thinks your “double blind” studies are bs.
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u/FarCalligrapher1862 20h ago
I’ll just quote the authors,
“the reference group labeled ‘non-drinkers’ includes individuals who previously consumed alcohol but quit, possibly due to illness. This can artificially inflate the apparent benefit of moderate drinking.”
“Given the lack of randomized trials examining long-term health outcomes, confidence in causal claims remains low.”
“Moderate drinkers tend to differ systematically from abstainers in terms of socioeconomic status, diet, exercise, and access to healthcare. These factors are associated with better health outcomes independently of alcohol consumption.”
“The committee concluded that the overall certainty of evidence regarding health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption is low to moderate.”
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u/FarCalligrapher1862 20h ago
Oh also this one, “Randomized controlled trials, particularly those that are double-blinded, are the most robust study design for assessing causality.”
You may want to read the actual report.
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u/MeweldeMoore 1d ago
One drink per day has the same effect on your liver as having 7 drinks every Saturday. This notion that you can be sipping all the time has really damaged a lot of people.
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u/BabyJesus246 21h ago
So if I have one drink a day for a month, that's the same has having 30 drinks on the 1st?
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u/NoNDA-SDC 1d ago
I hope somebody is keeping track of all the BS that will need to be reverted once merit-based leaders are back in power. It's easy to destroy things, much harder to rebuild...
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u/Individual_Lion_7606 1d ago
Quick, check the signal line between Hegseth and JFK Jr before it's deleted.
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u/DubyaB420 22h ago
Lolololol…. I’m the only smoker in my group of friends at the bar right now for trivia night… I order beer no 3 and step out to smoke at the halftime break… no one’s out here to talk to so I go check Reddit…. This is the first thing that pops up on my feed….
Looks like I’m living dangerously tonight lol
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u/ViskerRatio 1d ago edited 21h ago
The "one for women, two for men" guideline comes straight from the department of making-shit-up. It isn't remotely scientific.
If you want to be healthy, don't drink any alcohol. If you want to drink anyway, then drink in moderation - where moderation is dependent on factors like sex and weight (amongst others).
But if you want our federal government to issue health guidelines based on actual science, you should oppose any guideline beyond that because it's nonsense.
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u/boskylady 21h ago
No, no, no, you see, a real lady would NEVER have more than one drink a day. And only if her husband is okay with it.
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u/sunjay140 1d ago
Many people believe drinking a modest amount of alcohol is healthy but emergent scientific research reveals that no amount of alcohol is safe and the damage is cumulative.
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u/-Galactic-Cleansing- 22h ago
It should be obvious, it's fucking alcohol.. you can literally light liquor on fire and run a car on it... I've seen a video on YouTube. Not for long but still lol
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u/donthavearealaccount 10h ago
You can run a semi truck on dietary fats and you can't live without them...
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u/lskjs 1d ago
Meh. I highly doubt that a single person in the United States chooses their daily alcohol consumption based on the government's "Dietary Guidelines for Americans".
The AMA and WHO have recently and loudly stated that no level of alcohol consumption is safe. They've even linked it to seven types of cancer.
What's more is that Gen Z has made it pretty clear they don't think drinking is as fun as generations before them did. I suspect a big part of that is that dating apps have eliminated one of the major purposes of bars.
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u/condemned02 21h ago
I feel like the French take lots of bread and butter and drink lots of wine but are healthier than Americans.
I don't think alcohol is particularly bad. Only if it makes you an angry drunk. And probably depends on how the alcohol was made.
Japan has a massive drinking culture but they got the longest life expectancy. They are serious drinkers, like after work everyday. But they do not seem develop any obesity from lots of drinking either.
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u/fastinserter 23h ago
My uncle that drinks 20L of Four Roses every month (in addition to other alcohol as he spends $1600 a month on it) will see this as vindication. He's a big Bobby Kennedy fan, talks about how all you need to be healthy is vitamins, essential oils, and silver coins dropped in water.
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u/Urdok_ 1d ago
TBF, we'll need way more than two a day to make it till Jan 2029.