Daily Limit for Alcohol Consumption Removed from U.S. Dietary Guidelines
The USDA and HHS’s updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) for 2025 to 2030, released today, has removed any daily limit on alcohol consumption, reversing the guidelines’ previous allowance of two drinks per day for men and one drink for women. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz, among others, announced the new guidelines today at a press conference.
“The implication is, don’t have [alcohol] for breakfast,” Oz said at the briefing.
The backpedaling on the previous allotment signals a shift in understanding how alcohol can affect health, Oz said. The updated guidelines now advise: “Consume less alcohol for better overall health.” The former regulation urged citizens to “choose not to drink, or to drink in moderation by limiting intake to 2 drinks or less in a day for men and 1 drink or less in a day for women, when alcohol is consumed.” Oz said those claims were made without the backing of significant data.
At the press conference, Oz emphasized alcohol’s important role in healthy socialization, saying that the previous daily limits were probably “confused with broader data about social connectedness.”
“Alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together,” he said. “In the best case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but [alcohol] does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize.”
This is only the second time the government has drastically changed its recommendation on alcohol consumption since the DGA were first released in 1980. Each edition explicitly champions moderation, and early versions caution Americans against having more than two alcoholic beverages a day, but the two-for-men-and-one-for-women limits were first instated in 1990.
The updated guidelines come on the same day that representative James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released a report and press statement calling into question the Biden administration-backed study on potential health risks associated with alcohol consumption by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking. President Trump defunded the group in September, thwarting the study’s publication. Comer flamed the study for multiple reasons, including wasting taxpayer dollars and compiling a review panel made up of members from national and international anti-alcohol organizations.
The announcement of the updated DGA emphasized the priorities of the Make America Healthy Again movement and the Trump administration. The MAHA movement is helmed by the president and United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom notably abstain from consuming alcohol.
VP Pro Take
“Far be it from me to hand it to Dr. Oz, but “Don’t have it for breakfast” is truly a perfect slogan for the feds’ astonishing new abdication of alcohol consumption guidance. What a tremendous victory for the trade, whose corporate executives and lobbyists have emerged victorious from an 18-month campaign to water down or outright suppress unfavorable research from the country’s once-proud, since-captured public-health establishment.
Not only did RFK Jr.’s merry band of MAHA-brained charlatans do away with the glasses-per-day intake recommendations — a reductive but directionally useful guideline for consumers that has long vexed Big Booze — but they completely omitted any reference to the World Health Organization’s flashpoint 2022 finding that there is “no safe level” of consumption. As veteran spirits journalist (and occasional VinePair contributor) Susannah Skiver Barton put it, that’s “better than a best case scenario” envisioned by the trade. She’s right, and she should say it.
Neither the W.H.O.’s decree, nor the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking’s 2025 report finding strong links between alcohol and cancer, is beyond reproach, and there were kernels of truth to the critiques levied at the latter by anti-science Republicans and wine-caucus Democrats in Congress. But kernels do not a global neo-Prohibitionist conspiracy make.
Are the new DGA recommendations more lenient on alcohol because their authors considered all the available federal research on the matter? We know they are not: less than six months ago, Vox broke the news that unnamed figures in the Trump administration had intervened to prevent the ICCPUD study’s use in drafting these guidelines. That study’s Congressional enemies — chief among them James Comer, a GOP representative from Kentucky awash in campaign donations from brewers, winemakers, and distillers — hammered it on procedural, fiscal, and jurisdictional grounds, and from there, backed into a condemnation of its supposedly faulty science. (The House Oversight Committee’s latest report decrying the “Biden administration’s biased” study, timed to the release of the DGAs, is a victory lap thinly disguised behind a veneer of warmed-over accusations.) Again, there are real criticisms to be made here! But these are not serious people, and they’re certainly not public-health scientists who specialize in understanding alcohol’s population-level harms.
By pitching a partisan battle over the DGAs’ alcohol guidance, the Trump administration and the trade’s lobbyists have won a windfall for the bev-alc industry, but it came at the cost of the document’s institutional credibility, and the American drinking public’s full comprehension of the real risks of drinking. After all, the ICCPUD study was not the first study to link alcohol to cancer, and it almost certainly won’t be the last. Are most Americans even aware of those links? We know they are not. And the latest iteration of the DGAs will not enlighten them.” —Dave Infante, VinePair columnist and contributing editor
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