By Emma Rumney and Jessica DiNapoli
LONDON/NEW YORK, Jan 8 (Reuters) – Last spring, a group of officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was drafting a proposal to halve the recommended drinking limit 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,” health officials wrote in a draft of their proposal, reviewed by Reuters. The group was tasked with leading an update of the alcohol advice in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025-2030, the US government’s roadmap for healthy eating and drinking that influences school lunches, medical advice and other policies.
The draft proposal added that if both men and women consumed one or fewer drinks a day, it could save thousands of US lives a year. Advice for women would have remained the same at one drink a day.
“It seemed clear to me that the epidemiology of cancer suggests that there is an increased risk of breast cancer and head and neck cancer associated with less than one drink a day,” said David Berrigan, a former program director at the National Cancer Institute, a branch of the US health department, who was part of the panel that intended to recommend tightening the guidelines.
But the proposal never saw the light of day.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration took the opposite tack, releasing new guidelines that offer no advice on portions at all, instead only advising Americans to drink less for better health.
ADVICE TO CHANGE ABOUT ALCOHOL
The change removes a 35-year-old recommendation that men limit alcohol consumption to two drinks a day and women to one drink a day. It also followed a years-long lobbying campaign by the alcohol industry, worth about $1.2 trillion in global sales, according to beverage market research firm IWSR, to disrupt the work of health officials.
Public health experts and researchers have warned that the change could lead to more alcohol consumption and, ultimately, more alcohol-related deaths and illnesses.
“People are going to redefine that moderation around what it means to them, and obviously it can be a very wide range,” said Karen Hacker, who served as director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention until 2025.
In a statement, HHS said its policies were driven by evidence and standard science. “It is absurd to suggest that anything other than science is guiding our work on this presidential priority.”
At a White House news conference announcing Wednesday’s guidelines, Mehmet Oz, a prominent physician and administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said alcohol should be consumed in moderation. “Don’t have him for breakfast,” he said.
There has never been good data to support the prior guidance of two drinks a day for men and one for women, he continued.
A White House official told Reuters that the new guidelines make it clear that the Trump Administration is not being influenced by the industry and that alcohol consumption has been 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 criticized by major medical groups, and having fewer preservatives in food.
The International Alliance for Responsible Drinking, a group funded by major beer and spirits producers, says moderate drinking is low risk. Industry groups and companies declined to comment, did not respond, or said they wanted to make sure any changes to the guidelines were based on science.
Andrew Langer, director of the Center for Regulatory Freedom at the Conservative Policy Conference Foundation, called the new guidelines a “compromise position” between “the neo-temperance movement that says people shouldn’t drink anything and another group that says the US government shouldn’t make statements about alcohol.”
He said it would be “a bit hypocritical and disingenuous” for the administration to take steps to loosen regulations on marijuana and psychedelics while implementing a stricter policy on alcohol consumption.
ALCOHOL DUEL STUDIES
The US dietary guidelines are the focus of lobbying by the industries they affect, including everything from sugar, cattle and dairy to the wine, beer and spirits industries.
Leading producers such as Johnnie Walker whiskey maker Diageo and Miller Lite owner Molson Coors and their trade associations have started campaigning for the 2025-2030 guidelines at least as early as 2021.
In 2022, Congress appropriated $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 non-profit organization authorized by Congress. Two former alcohol lobbyists said the industry lobbied MPs for the study.
Funding for the study was first proposed in a bill introduced by Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, a major manufacturing hub for Molson Coors, the second-largest US brewer.
Lobbying disclosures show lobbyists Molson Coors and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States petitioned lawmakers about Baldwin’s bill in 2022. The spirits industry body said in a statement it wanted to ensure alcohol guidance was based on “sound science – not opinion or ideology.”
Baldwin’s office said the legislation was written with input from several lawmakers, but that she supported funding the study as “sound science needed 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 alcohol consumption is associated with a lower risk of dying from any cause, a finding that the industry regularly touts, although it also found some negative health effects.
Meanwhile, in February 2022, HHS officials began planning a separate study on alcohol’s health effects, public records show. That study, carried out by six scientists commissioned by health officials and called the Alcohol Use and Health Study, warned that even one drink a day can increase the risk of liver, mouth and throat cancer. Draft conclusions from that study were published in January 2025.
Industry groups argued that NASEM’s report was more independent, credible and scientific than the government’s work, which it said was led by scientists biased against alcohol, a position contested by public health groups.
In January 2025, Science Over Bias, a coalition of alcohol, agriculture and hospitality associations, said in a statement that the HHS report was the product of a “flawed, opaque and unprecedented process rife with bias and conflicts of interest” and should be ignored.
Priscilla Martinez, one of the HHS-commissioned scientists who worked on the study on alcohol use and health, said “people should know that alcohol causes cancer.” She added that she was disappointed that the report, which she called scientifically rigorous, had been ignored.
ALCOHOL EXPERTS REDEEM OR REASSIGN
On February 13, about 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 of five key health officials who planned to recommend stricter guidelines, including the CDC’s alcohol lead, have been fired as part of the mass layoffs, according to two former government sources.
The rest were later taken off the draft alcohol, the two people said. One of the people said the remaining team was removed and replaced in May.
Dorothy Fink, a senior health official with a background in endocrinology, took over writing the alcohol guidelines, three sources familiar with the matter said. Fink did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An HHS spokesman pointed Reuters to information from the scientific report accompanying the guidelines, which says the Trump Administration followed its own assessments of the evidence and scientific work to inform them, by experts in the field.
According to the science report, the Trump administration ultimately used the industry-preferred NASEM study for the new alcohol guidelines.
Jennifer Tiller, a newly appointed USDA senior adviser, also oversaw the drinking guidelines, meeting with alcohol trade groups in the spring and summer, emails obtained by Reuters show. Tiller previously served as a member of Congress, a role in which he questioned health officials’ work on alcohol, according to emails obtained by Reuters.
Tiller referred Reuters’ questions to the USDA’s press office. A USDA spokesperson said the guidelines are based on scientific evidence: “Recommendations, 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)