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Experts Can’t Agree Over How Much Alcohol Men Should Drink
Should a 30-year-old recommendation be cut in half?
For the past 30 years, the USDA has advised men to limit themselves to two alcoholic drinks per day. The reasoning: Binge drinking (defined, for men, as consuming five drinks in two hours) isn’t the only type of drinking that harms health. Consuming more than two drinks per day, or 14 total per week, is considered heavy drinking and is linked to a battery of issues, including cancer, alcoholism, cognitive problems, and injuries.
With the publication of the new 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) at the tail end of 2020, the recommendations on drinking remain the same. Men should still limit themselves to two drinks per day.
But if the authors of the DGA had listened to the experts they hired to advise on these matters, that recommendation would have been slashed in half. Men would have been advised to consume one drink per day, max, which would have fallen in line with women’s recommendations.
So what happened?
Prior to the publication of the new DGA, a Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, made up of 20 medical, nutrition, and public health experts from universities around the country, was assembled to make recommendations on what goes in (or…
