By Emma Rumney and Jessica DiNapoli
LONDON/NEW YORK, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Last spring, a group of officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was drafting a proposal to halve the recommended limit for alcohol consumption for men to one drink a day, according to two former government sources and a document seen by Reuters.
"Alcohol is known to cause cancer," the health officials wrote in the draft version of their proposal reviewed by Reuters. The group was tasked with leading an update
to alcohol advice in the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the U.S. government's roadmap to healthy drinking and eating that influences school lunches, medical advice and other policies.
The draft proposal added that if both men and women had one or fewer drinks per day it could save thousands of U.S. lives per year. Advice for women would have remained the same at one drink per day.
"It seemed clear to me that the cancer epidemiology suggested that there was an increased risk of breast cancer and head and neck cancer associated with less than one drink per day,” said David Berrigan, a former program director at the National Cancer Institute, an arm of the U.S. health department, who was part of the group that planned to recommend tightening the guidelines.
But the proposal never saw the light of day.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration took the opposite tack, publishing new guidelines that give no advice at all on servings, instead just advising Americans to drink less for better health.
SHIFTING ADVICE ON ALCOHOL
The change eliminates a recommendation in place for 35 years that men limit alcohol consumption to two drinks per day and women to one drink per day. It also followed a years-long lobbying campaign by the alcohol industry, worth some $1.2 trillion in global sales according to drinks market research firm IWSR, to disrupt the health officials' work.
Public health experts and researchers warned the change could lead to higher alcohol consumption and, ultimately, more alcohol-linked death and disease.
“People will redefine that moderation around what it means to them and, obviously, that can be a very large range,” said Karen Hacker, who served as Director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention until 2025.
In a statement, HHS said its policies were driven by evidence and gold-standard science. “It is absurd to suggest that anything other than science guides our work on this presidential priority.”
At a White House press conference announcing the guidance on Wednesday, Mehmet Oz, celebrity physician and administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said that alcohol should be consumed in small amounts. “Don’t have it for breakfast,” he said.
There was never good data supporting the prior guidance of two drinks per day for men and one for women, he continued.
A White House official told Reuters it was clear from the new guidelines that the Trump Administration was not being influenced by industry, and added alcohol consumption was at a multi-decade low anyway.
Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. do not drink and the Make America Healthy Again social movement aligned with them makes minimal reference to alcohol, focusing its efforts on reducing childhood vaccinations, a position decried by major medical groups, and having fewer preservatives in food.
The International Alliance for Responsible Drinking, a group funded by leading brewers and spirits makers, says that drinking in moderation is low risk. Industry groups and companies either declined to comment, did not respond or said they wanted to ensure any changes to guidance were based on science.
Andrew Langer, director of the Center for Regulatory Freedom at the Conservative Political Conference Foundation, called the new guidelines a “compromise position” between “the neo-temperance movement saying people should not drink anything at all and another group who says the U.S. government shouldn’t be making statements about alcohol.”
He said it would be “a little hypocritical and disingenuous” for the administration to take steps to loosen regulations on marijuana and psychedelics while implementing tighter policy on drinking.
DUELLING ALCOHOL STUDIES
The U.S. dietary guidelines are the focus of lobbying by the industries they impact, including everything from sugar, cattle and dairy to the wine, beer, and spirits industries.
Top producers like Johnnie Walker whisky maker Diageo and Molson Coors, owner of Miller Lite, and their trade associations, started campaigning on the 2025-2030 guidelines at least as far back as 2021.
In 2022, Congress set aside $1.3 million for a study on the health effects of alcohol to be conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), a congressionally chartered non-profit. Two former alcohol lobbyists said that the industry lobbied lawmakers for the study.
Funding for the study was first proposed in a bill introduced by Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, a major production hub for Molson Coors, the second-largest brewer in the U.S.
Lobbying disclosures show lobbyists for Molson Coors and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States petitioned lawmakers on Baldwin’s bill in 2022. The spirits industry body said in a statement it wanted to ensure alcohol guidance is grounded in “sound science - not opinion or ideology.”
Baldwin’s office said the legislation was written with input from several lawmakers but that she stood by funding the study as “sound science necessary to inform public health guidelines.”
Molson did not respond to requests for comment, and Diageo declined to comment.
Released in December 2024, the NASEM study concluded that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk of dying from any cause, a finding the industry regularly promotes, though it also found some negative health effects.
Meanwhile, in February 2022, officials at HHS began planning a separate study on the health effects of alcohol, public records show. That study, conducted by six scientists commissioned by the health officials and called the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, warned that even one drink a day can raise the risk of liver, mouth and throat cancers. Draft findings from that study were released in January 2025.
Industry groups argued that the NASEM report was more independent, credible and scientific than the government's work, which it said was being led by scientists biased against alcohol, a position public health groups disputed.
In January 2025, Science Over Bias, a coalition of alcohol, agriculture and hospitality associations, said in a statement the HHS report was the product of a “flawed, opaque and unprecedented process, rife with bias and conflicts of interest” and should be disregarded.
Priscilla Martinez, one of the HHS-commissioned scientists who worked on the Alcohol Intake and Health study, said that “people should know alcohol causes cancer.” She added that she is disappointed that the report, which she called scientifically rigorous, had been sidelined.
ALCOHOL EXPERTS FIRED OR REASSIGNED
On February 13, around a month after both studies were released, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was sworn in as Trump’s health secretary.
In early April, Kennedy laid off more than 10,000 people in a major overhaul of the health department and its agencies. Two out of five key health officials that planned to recommend tighter guidelines, including the CDC’s alcohol lead, were fired as part of the mass layoffs, according to two former government sources.
The remainder were subsequently removed from the alcohol project, the two people said. One of those people said the remaining team were removed and replaced in May.
Dorothy Fink, a senior health official with a background in endocrinology, took over writing the guidelines for alcohol, three sources familiar with the matter said. Fink did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An HHS spokesperson pointed Reuters to information in the scientific report accompanying the guidelines, which stated that the Trump Administration had pursued its own evidence reviews and scientific work to inform them, conducted by subject matter experts.
The Trump administration ultimately used the industry-preferred NASEM study for the new alcohol guidelines, according to the scientific report.
Jennifer Tiller, a newly appointed senior advisor at USDA, also oversaw the guidelines for drinking, meeting with alcohol trade groups in the spring and summer, emails obtained by Reuters show. Tiller previously worked as a Congressional staffer, a role in which she questioned the health officials’ work on alcohol, according to emails obtained by Reuters.
Tiller referred Reuters' questions to the USDA press office. A USDA spokesperson said the guidelines are based on scientific evidence: “Recommendations, just like evidence, evolve over time.”
(Reporting by Emma Rumney in London and Jessica DiNapoli in New York; Additional reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington; Editing by Lisa Jucca and Michael Learmonth)
