Two drinks a day is now too much for an American man.
The Federal Advisory Committee on Dietary Guidelines, a panel of health experts that publishes a comprehensive report every five years, has revised its guidelines for alcohol consumption. Its new recommendation is that men should limit their alcohol intake to one drink per day, the same advice it gives to women. The commission’s previous recommendation for men was two drinks a day. A “standard” alcoholic beverage in the US contains about 0.6 liquid ounces of pure alcohol.
Based on risk studies that take into account everything from accidents and suicide to cancer and alcoholic cirrhosis, the panel found that “the predominance 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 appeared publicly in June when the commission’s preliminary draft began to make the rounds.
The advisory panel’s report states that alcohol consumption causes around 100,000 deaths each year in the US and that “binge drinking is common.”
“Unlike energy (ie calorie) intake, alcohol does not provide much nutritional value,” the report points out. The commission defines 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 than 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 argued that while alcohol consumption has important personal, social, and entertainment value for many Americans, it argued that people who do not drink at all should adhere to that behavior.
“The observational evidence base regarding alcohol consumption is not sufficient to recommend drinking at any level, especially for a substance that is intoxicating, potentially addictive, and a leading cause of death and other harm,” the panel concludes.
The report, which offers health advice outside of drinking, says that more than half of all adults in the U.S. “have one or more common chronic diseases, many of which are related to unusual dietary intake.”
• Read the 2020 report to the Advisory Committee on Dietary Guidelines.
– Douglas Perry
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