New federal dietary guidelines for Americans reportedly may remove specific limitations on the maximum amount of alcohol Americans should consume in favor of more general language about drinking in moderation.
The change, reported by Reuters, would be a marked departure from language that has been in place since the 1990s. The guidelines have long stated that men should have no more than two drinks a day and women no more than one.
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The guidelines define one drink as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1 1/2 ounces of distilled spirits. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services update the guidelines every five years. The 2025 to 2030 guidelines may be released as soon as this month.
More general language would be "so vague as to be unhelpful," Eva Greenthal, a senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit focused on nutrition, health and food safety, told Reuters.
But that language may be a boon to the alcohol industry, which is facing the rise of non-alcoholic drinks, a decline in drinking among Generation Z and more red flags about the health dangers of alcohol consumption.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory in January noting that alcohol consumption was a leading cause of preventable cancer and calling for warnings about cancer risk on alcohol labels. The advisory followed research showing that drinking causes cancer and is unhealthy overall. In 2023, the World Health Organization released a statement that no amount of alcohol is safe.
But a 2024 evidence review from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said drinking in moderation was associated with lower risk of death from any cause and from some forms of heart disease, compared to not drinking at all. And it said there was insufficient evidence to link drinking to cancers, except for breast cancer.
"This report is a thinly veiled effort to undo the growing evidence that alcohol causes cancer and is increasingly associated with serious health outcomes," Diane Riibe, co-founder of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, a nonprofit focused on the harms of alcohol, told the New York Times last year.
She added that the alcohol industry – expected to reap more than $300 billion in 2025 – "needed the informed national conversation to come to a screeching halt, because none of the current or emerging science says that moderate drinking may be healthier than not drinking."
The alcohol manufacturers Anheuser-Busch InBev and Diageo spent millions of dollars in 2024 and 2025 in lobbying around the guidelines and tax and trade issues, Reuters reported.
The United Kingdom has guidelines advising people not to drink more than 14 units of alcohol a week, the equivalent of six pints of lower-strength beer or 10 small glasses of lower-strength wine. France's alcohol recommendations, last updated in 2022, advise people to drink a maximum of two standard drinks a day and not to drink every day.