RFK Jr. announces new dietary guidelines
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced new dietary guidelines, saying his message is clear: eat real food.
Federal health officials are no longer advising how many alcoholic drinks are safe for Americans, instead urging people to “consume less alcohol” and abstain altogether if they have certain health conditions.
The new advice from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services is an about-face from a longstanding government guideline that said drinking in moderation meant two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women.
Scientists, nutritionists and advocates say the new guidance is too vague for people to apply to their everyday lives, and criticize the Trump administration for missing an opportunity to warn about alcohol’s link to cancer and other health problems.
“Any level of drinking has some risk, and it increases with more drinking,” said Christopher Kahler, the director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University. “There’s no discussion of risk in the guidelines now, just that drinking less is better for your health.”
For the first time, the committee that put together the bulk of the dietary guidance did not address alcohol themselves, according to Deirdre Kay Tobias, a nutrition professor at Harvard University who was on the committee. Instead, the Trump administration relied on advice from two outside committees to study how alcohol affects health.
One study found the risk of breast cancer increases with every drink a person consumes each day, among other things. A draft of the other report said the risk of dying from alcohol use “begins at very low levels of average use,” and linked alcohol use to seven types of cancers.
But the administration wrote in a document that it chose not to “consider the findings” of those two committees.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a news conference Jan. 7 that alcohol’s value comes from being a social lubricant that brings friends together to have a good time, but said the “best case scenario” would be not drinking at all.
“There is alcohol in these dietary guidelines, but the implication is don’t have it for breakfast, all right?” Oz said. “This should be something done in a small amount and hopefully at some kind of an event that might have alcohol at it.”
Oz said “there was never really good data to support” women having one drink per day and men having two drinks per day. “That data was probably primarily confused with broader data about social connectiveness,” he said.
Teresa Fung, a registered dietician and professor at Simmons University in Boston, said people who come to her want specific guidance that gives them a clear message, not a general recommendation to eat or drink more or less of something.
“The current recommendation of ‘drink less alcohol’ is vague,” Fung said. “Like, what does it mean? I drink a six pack a day, do I now drink five? It’s less, but is it good enough? And those who drink once a month, do they have to drink less?”
Kahler, from Brown University, said the one-to-two drink standard gave people a clear benchmark to consider their drinking habits, for doctors to give medical advice and for academics like him to study people drinking excessively.
“Were the prior guidelines a license to drink?” he asked. “I think there were some concerns that they were indicating that that level of drinking is safe, and I think research has established that there are known risks at even lower levels of drinking.”
Mike Marshall, the CEO of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, said his group advocated to reduce the level of moderate drinking to one drink per day for men. He said they tried many times to meet with Kennedy or his staff but were unsuccessful.
USA TODAY reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services for response.
Marshall cited the draft study showing that men who have seven drinks per week have a one in 1,000 chance of dying from an alcohol-related issue, compared to a one in 25 chance at 14 drinks per week.
“It’s disappointing, frustrating and in the end it’s going to be very harmful to American families,” he said.
If you or someone you know needs help reducing their alcohol use, visit rethinkingdrinking.niaaa.nih.gov.
