Two drinks a day is now too much for an American man.
The federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a panel of health experts that publishes a comprehensive report every five years, has revised its alcohol-consumption guidance. Its new recommendation is that men should limit their alcohol intake to one drink per day, the same advice it gives for women. The committee’s previous recommendation for men was two drinks per day. A “standard” alcoholic drink in the U.S. has about 0.6 fluid ounces of pure alcohol in it.
Based on risk studies that take into account everything from accidents and suicide to cancer and alcoholic cirrhosis, the panel found that “the preponderance of evidence indicates that risks are increased at levels above one drink per day on average for both men and women.”
This new recommendation first surfaced publicly in June when the committee’s preliminary draft began making the rounds.
The advisory panel’s report states that alcohol consumption causes around 100,000 deaths every year in the U.S. and that “binge drinking is common.”
“Other than energy (i.e., calorie) intake, alcohol provides little nutritional value,” the report points out. The committee defined excessive drinking as “consuming 5 or more drinks per occasion or 15 or more drinks per week for men, and 4 or more drinks per occasion or 8 or more drinks per week for women.”
The new recommendations for men are not universally accepted by the medical community.
Dr. Craig McClain, an expert on alcohol abuse at the University of Louisville, said he “could not find a convincing argument, certainly not a preponderance of evidence, to justify the change.”
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, while acknowledging that alcohol consumption has meaningful personal, social and entertainment value for many Americans, argued that people who don’t drink at all should stick with that behavior.
“The observational evidence base with respect to alcohol consumption is insufficient to recommend drinking at any level, particularly for a substance that is intoxicating, potentially addictive, and a leading preventable cause of death and other harms,” the panel concludes.
The report, which provides health advice beyond drinking, says that more than half of all adults in the U.S. “have one or more preventable chronic diseases, many of which are related to unhealthy dietary intakes.”
• Read the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s 2020 report.
-- Douglas Perry
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