Amid increasing rates of cancer among young people and growing evidence that no level of alcohol consumption is safe, the United States stands as an outlier in telling its citizens that drinking alcohol in moderation is OK, despite copious evidence to the contrary.
This can change in 2025, and the new administration, with its desire to “Make America Healthy Again,” has the ability to make this a priority. It can start by addressing the problem of industry-funded studies.
It’s no secret that much of the research that shows the purported health benefits of everything from blueberries to booze is funded by companies that profit from the investment. “Funders are funding research for one particular result,” said Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “They want results that will sell what they’re selling.”
The National Institutes of Health require disclosure of funding sources in research, but Nestle says, “Disclosure is not enough. It’s a necessary first step, but it’s not enough to solve the problem.”
The problem is a longstanding one, but deserves fresh scrutiny because of the competing narratives emerging as the U.S. dietary guidelines are set for revision in 2025. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for warning labels on alcohol, saying that alcohol “is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States — greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year in the U.S. — yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk.”
Murthy’s advisory conflicts with a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that said there was evidence of both harm and benefit from moderate drinking, and that light consumption of alcohol might reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and overall mortality. That report was sharply criticized by people who believe the government should take a firm stance against drinking. Speaking to The New York Times, Diane Riibe, co-founder of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, called the report “a thinly veiled effort to undo the growing evidence that alcohol causes cancer and is increasingly associated with serious health outcomes.”
Is any amount of alcohol safe?
The growing chorus against alcohol includes actor Tom Holland, who said giving up alcohol allowed him to be “the best version of myself,” and podcaster Dr. Andrew Huberman, a professor at Stanford University who says that the best amount of alcohol to drink is “zero” and that the negative health effects begin to mount after just two drinks a week.
Again, the U.S. dietary guidelines currently in place say men should limit their alcohol consumption to no more than two drinks a day and considers that drinking in moderation.
According to the 2020-2025 guidelines: “To help Americans move toward a healthy dietary pattern and minimize risks associated with drinking, adults of legal drinking age can choose not to drink or to drink in moderation by limiting intakes to 2 drinks or less in a day for men and 1 drink or less in a day for women, on days when alcohol is consumed. This is not intended as an average over several days, but rather the amount consumed on any single day.”
That is wording that could be construed as drinking being part of a “healthy dietary pattern.”
“The alcohol industry would love for everyone to believe that moderate amounts of alcohol reduce the risk of heart disease and never mind that they increase the risk for breast and colorectal cancer,” Nestle told me.
“That’s where the sharp discrepancies are between the National Academies report — which some people think is tainted by financial connections to the alcohol industry — and the surgeon general’s report, which says that alcohol causes cancer, flat out, and any amount of alcohol increases the risk. There’s a lot of money at stake here.”
Writing in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Thomas F. Babor, the journal’s editor-in-chief, said that the alcohol industry’s influence on research threatens public health. “Researchers, clinicians, government officials, and policy-makers generally agree that there is no place for the tobacco industry in medical research or public health policy,” Babor wrote. Likewise, alcohol industry representatives should be kept “at arm’s length,” he argued.
Babor also argued for controls on the “revolving door” that has allowed government health officials to take corporate jobs, scrutiny for industry bias, and new leadership with an emphasis on public health, given that “recent evidence from state-of-the-art policy research studies has indicated that major improvements in life expectancy can be derived from alcohol policies such as restrictions on alcohol availability, affordability, and marketing.”
An ‘easy solution’ to industry-funded studies
A longtime critic of industry-funded studies in the food and drug industries, Nestle said there are decades of studies showing how funding sources affect outcomes, largely through how research is designed and interpreted, even when researchers insist that they are “just doing science.”
That mantra emerged in a statement given to The New York Times by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the Beer Institute and other industry organizations which said that U.S. dietary guidelines “must be guided by a preponderance of the sound science.”
In 2020, a study was published that found no link between the influence of industry funding on alcohol research. Writing about it at the time, Nestle said the study defied credulity — because many of the authors worked for the Dutch Beer Institute. In another egregious example, the National Institutes of Health solicited funding from alcohol companies to help pay for a study on whether a daily drink could be part of a healthy lifestyle. The study was later shut down after outcry when The New York Times reported on it in 2018.
While some argue that corporate money is necessary because of the scarcity of funding for research, Nestle said there is an easy solution: “They could all contribute to a common fund and then have a third-party do the distribution of those funds, so the recipient would have no idea who the funders were. ... And when I say that to food companies, they say right away they’re not interested in doing that. So this is not about the science. It’s about marketing,” she said.
And that marketing makes it difficult for the consumer to discern the truth, about alcohol or anything else. As Boston University professor David Jernigan has said, “The point of marketing is to sell a product ... when you’re selling a product that kills 140,000 people a year, you have to be very creative. And you can’t be as direct as would be good for the public’s health.”
But in this regard, the incoming administration is uniquely poised to help.
What Donald Trump has said about drinking
President-elect Donald Trump is perhaps the nation’s most famous teetotaler. He has said he’s never had a glass of alcohol because he observed the effects of drinking on his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., who suffered from alcohol addiction and died of a heart attack at 43. Trump has also said that he taught his children from an early change “no drugs, no alcohol, no smoking.” But according to Politico, Trump has said he has not talked much about his dislike of alcohol with people he works with, nor has he discouraged others from drinking. It would go a long way to help “make America healthy again” if Trump would talk to the country about alcohol like he talked to his kids.
Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has also struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and even now attends 12-step meetings, the Palm Beach Post reported. Assuming Kennedy is confirmed, he will likely have influence over the new dietary guidelines — if they are issued at all.
Trump has said that it’s easy not to drink or take alcohol if you never start, and that we should be teaching young people what his older brother told him: “Don’t drink. Don’t drink. Don’t drink.”
We can argue about whether the government should be in the business of issuing dietary guidelines at all, particularly since some of the USDA’s advice has been challenged as being outdated or influenced by lobbyists. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, for example, puts out its own “Healthy Eating Plate” guidelines that in some ways contradict the USDA’s “MyPlate” recommendations, saying that “The Healthy Eating Plate is based exclusively on the best available science and was not subjected to political or commercial pressures from food industry lobbyists.”
But so long as it’s going to continue to tell us what we should eat and drink, the government’s message on drinking should be as strong as Huberman’s: The only safe amount of alcohol is zero. And going forward, no research funded by the alcohol industry should be cited in a government report.