By Alex Streinger
For the first time in more than three decades, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans – the federal government’s five-year nutrition blueprint intended to inform health professionals – amended its alcohol recommendations in the 2025-2030 cycle. Yet at a moment when scientific evidence increasingly underscores the health harms of alcohol, the guidance did not get clearer. It got more vague.
It’s a retreat from 30 years of progress
on alcohol policy.”
Mike Marshall, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance
Since 1990, the guidelines had advised adults who drink alcohol to limit their intake to no more than two alcoholic drinks per day for men and one alcoholic drink per day for women. In the latest edition, issued in January, the numeric ceiling was removed and replaced with a vague recommendation to “consume less alcohol for better health.”
It’s a retreat from 30 years of progress on alcohol policy,” said Mike Marshall, the chief executive officer of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization aiming to prevent and reduce alcohol-related harm.
Mike Marshall, CEO, U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance
An investigation by Movendi International finds the rollback followed years of lobbying by the alcohol industry, which spent tens of millions of dollars to shape federal messaging on alcohol consumption. The effort comes as the industry confronts a growing threat to its bottom line in the United States: declining alcohol consumption and increasing public awareness of alcohol’s health risks.
An Industry Under Pressure
A 2025 Gallup survey revealed U.S. Americans are consuming less alcohol than ever, and they often cite alcohol’s health risks as the reason why. Those risks primarily include cancer, cardiovascular disease, liver damage and mental health disorders.
Last year, Anheuser-Busch, Constellation Brands, Diageo and Pernod Ricard – four of the world’s top 10 alcoholic-beverage companies by market capitalization – scaled back operations in the United States amid a softening market. Moreover, since 2021, the global alcohol sector has lost $830 billion in market value, according to Bloomberg, “as [alcohol use] habits change.”
The alcohol industry is very concerned about declining rates of alcohol use in the general population,” said Thomas Babor, a former chairman of the department of public health sciences at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.
They are worried that the decline in alcohol use is linked to health concerns, and the research on alcohol and cancer, in particular, is discouraging people from drinking alcohol.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledges the International Agency for
Research on Cancer’s 1988 classification of alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen – the highest risk category, reserved for substances with conclusive evidence of carcinogenicity in humans. It has been linked to increased risks of several cancers, including those of the breast, colon, liver, mouth and throat.
How the Alcohol Industry Influenced the Alcohol Recommendations in the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans
In February 2022, as federal officials began revisiting the nation’s dietary recommendations, Rachel Levine, the then-assistant secretary for health, and Tom Vilsack, the then-secretary of agriculture, set into motion a study to help determine how alcohol would be addressed in the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
They tasked the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD) – a United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) body led by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration – with examining the relationship between alcohol consumption and health.
But the initiative was replicated 10 months later, in December, when Congress intervened. Through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, lawmakers allocated $1.3 million for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to contract the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) for a review of the scientific evidence on the health effects of alcohol, also intended to inform the upcoming guidelines.
In the months between the commissioning of the parallel reviews, the Beer Institute and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), a pair of trade groups of the alcohol industry, along with Molson Coors and Suntory Global Spirits, two of the 22 biggest alcohol companies in the world, spent a combined $11.32 million on lobbying across filings that listed the Dietary Guidelines for Americans among the issues lobbied on, according to Lobbying Disclosure Act records.
The only thing that we’ve advocated for is to ensure that the U.S. Dietary Guidelines are
governed by the preponderance of evidence,” said Chris Swonger, the president and chief executive officer of DISCUS.
The Beer Institute, Molson Coors and Suntory Global Spirits did not respond to multiple requests for comment on their lobbying goals.
Two Studies, Two Very Different Answers
Though established to serve the same purpose, the reviews advanced independently and produced significantly different results.
The ICCPUD’s “Alcohol Intake & Health Study” deduced that, for the U.S. American population, “the risk of dying from alcohol use begins at low levels of drinking.”
Conversely, the NASEM’s “Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health” inferred that people who consume moderate levels of alcohol have a “lower risk of all-cause mortality” compared with those who abstain from consuming alcohol entirely.
Why Scientists Say The Surviving Review Is Flawed
Tim Stockwell, one of the latter’s reviewers and a scientist at the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, challenged its findings, claiming it overestimated the health benefits and underestimated harms from alcohol consumption by excluding most of the “relevant” research on moderate alcohol use and health in an attempt to avoid “abstainer bias.” This methodological distinction occurs when moderate alcohol consumers are compared to an abstainer group that includes former alcohol users who stopped due to underlying health conditions, thereby making moderate alcohol consumption appear healthier by comparison.
It’s disingenuous of them to say, ‘Let’s just chuck out 90 percent of studies on alcohol and cancer mortality because people haven’t used a strict lifetime abstainer group,’” Stockwell said.
When in fact, if you’d included them, you’d still find a significant risk for low volume, moderate drinking compared with the abstainers.”
Tim Stockwell, scientist, University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research
Stockwell’s concerns were echoed by Michael Siegel, a professor of public health and community medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, who similarly criticized the review for discarding much of the existing literature. Siegel also went further, arguing, among other things, that some of the studies it retained did not eliminate abstainer bias.
The reality is that NASEM threw out most of the existing literature, virtually hundreds of studies,” Siegel said.
Moreover, while they claimed to have addressed the abstainer bias problem, they actually failed to do this because not all of the included studies adequately address the problem. In fact, restricting the studies to lifelong nondrinkers might itself introduce an abstainer bias problem. The bottom line is that throwing out or not considering studies is not an appropriate method in epidemiological reviews. All the evidence needs to be considered. The methodological limitations of studies need to be considered along with the evidence. But throwing out massive amounts of information out the window a priori is simply not an appropriate technique.”
Michael Siegel, professor of public health and community medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine
Siegel also stated the NASEM review failed to account for methodological limitations, giving no additional weight to randomized trials or Mendelian randomized studies while relying heavily on weaker cross-sectional evidence.
Nevertheless, HHS and USDA, the agencies responsible for the guidelines, utilized the NASEM review to brief the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ alcohol guidance, according to “The Scientific Foundation for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”
January 2023 to June 2025: The Lobbying Escalates
The decision unfolded against a backdrop of mounting alcohol industry lobbying once the NASEM review was formalized. Between January 2023 and June 2025, industry players, namely the American Beverage Licensees, the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Anheuser-Busch, the Beer Institute, Brown-Forman, Diageo, DISCUS, Heineken, Moët Hennessy, Molson Coors, Napa Valley Vintners, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, Pernod Ricard, Sazerac, Suntory Global Spirits, Wine America, the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America and the Wine Institute, jointly expended nearly $55 million on lobbying related to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, according to disclosures that explicitly referenced the guidelines. Except for DISCUS, none responded to multiple requests for comment on their lobbying goals.
That activity coincided with further congressional action. In the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, Congress ordered HHS and USDA to “consider the findings and recommendations of a [NASEM] report on alcohol consumption in the development of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”
January 2025: New Leadership, And A Study Set Aside
After President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, oversight of the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ alcohol recommendations shifted to Dorothy Fink, the assistant secretary for health from May to November 2025, and now the principal deputy assistant secretary for health, and Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture.
Under Rollins, Jennifer Tiller, who was appointed chief of staff to the deputy secretary of agriculture, also played a hand in developing the alcohol guidance. In the first half of 2025, she met with representatives from the Beer Institute, DISCUS and the Wine Institute, according to emails obtained by Movendi through a Freedom of Information Act request. Neither Tiller nor the three alcohol industry trade groups provided clarification on the purpose of those meetings despite multiple requests for comment.
With the new leadership in place, the ICCPUD study was sidelined. In addition to its primary conclusion, the study found that “alcohol use is associated with increased mortality for seven types of cancer,” as well as the development of liver cirrhosis.
It felt like a loss for science that it wasn’t included.”
Priscilla Martinez, Alcohol Research Group
According to Tim Naimi and Priscilla Martinez, two of its six authors, in August 2025, the panel was notified the study would not be utilized to advise the impending guidelines. Naimi is the director of the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and Martinez is the deputy scientific director of the Alcohol Research Group.
It was really disappointing,” Martinez said.
We did our best to make sure that this was going to be a useful study, rigorous science to help inform the U.S. alcohol guidelines. And we did. We used state-of-the-art science, statistical methods and modeling. It felt like a loss for science that it wasn’t included.”
Priscilla Martinez, deputy scientific director, Alcohol Research Group
Emily Hilliard, the HHS press secretary, wrote in an email that the decision to solely leverage the NASEM review to inform the guidelines’ alcohol recommendations was consistent with Congress’s directions laid out in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.
Three months later, in November 2025, lawmakers directed the heads of HHS and USDA to “only consider the findings and recommendations of the NASEM report in the development of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans” as part of the Continuing Appropriations, Agriculture, Legislative Branch, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Extensions Act, 2026. As in the 2023 and 2024 Consolidated Appropriation Acts, the legislation also required that the guidelines reflect the “preponderance of scientific and medical knowledge,” language that parrots DISCUS’ description of its lobbying objectives.
“This wasn’t about science,” Siegel said. “This was pure politics, and it was orchestrated by the alcohol industry.”
This wasn’t about science. This was pure politics, and it was orchestrated by the alcohol industry.”
Michael Siegel, Tufts University School of Medicine
The Conflict of Interest That Went Unexamined
Ned Calonge, the chair of the NASEM review and the associate dean for public health at the Colorado School of Public Health, denied involvement from the alcohol industry in the report. But a disclosure and affiliation show at least one of the review’s panelists has industry ties.
Luc Djoussé, an associate professor in the department of nutrition at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health, self-reported receiving grant funding from The Foundation for Alcohol Research, a nonprofit organization that supports research on alcohol’s health effects, and was itself financed by the alcohol industry until 2016. He is also a member of the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research (ISFAR), an organization consisting of physicians and scientists “who are committed to balanced and well researched analysis regarding alcohol and health,” according to its website. Public health watchdogs and independent researchers revealed that ISFAR has close ties to Big Alcohol. Creina Stockley and Henk Hendriks, the group’s co-directors, have extensive financial connections with the global alcohol industry. Djoussé referred a request for comment about this potential conflict of interest to the NASEM, which did not respond to multiple requests.
How The Industry Went After The ICCPUD Study
While this contentious NASEM review panelist went uncontested by federal officials, the alcohol industry mounted a campaign to discredit the ICCPUD study.
One day before the ICCPUD study’s draft was released on January 15, 2025 – its official version was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs in June after the federal government rejected it – 23 national trade associations representing the agriculture, beverage and hospitality industries urged HHS and USDA to “disregard the ICCPUD report in their final assessments for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” partly due to “clear evidence of bias and conflicts of interest in those tasked with conducting the research, including ties to international temperance organizations and anti-alcohol advocacy efforts.”
Those organizations had a powerful ally in Rep. James Comer, the chair of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the House of Representatives’ main investigative committee.
He represents Kentucky, which produces roughly 95 percent of the world’s bourbon and whose economy is heavily dependent on alcohol. In April 2024, Comer launched an investigation into the ICCPUD study, culminating in the release of “A Study Fraught With Bias: How the Biden Administration’s Alcohol Intake and Health Study Tried to Undermine the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans” on the same day the guidelines came out.
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s majority staff report echoed the claims raised by the aforementioned trade groups. It also found that the study in question was guided by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction’s “Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health: Final Report,” a government-commissioned review that informed Canada’s alcohol-consumption guidelines. The 2023 review concluded that “when it comes to drinking alcohol, less consumption means less risk of harm from alcohol,” which Comer’s team interpreted to mean that no amount of alcohol consumption is safe, a position supported by the WHO.
It’s kind of obvious it was a political hack job. The panel was not biased.
Tim Naimi, Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research
The government report argued that the ICCPUD recruited “biased” scientists to develop research to reinforce that premise, noting that the Canadian review was authored by Naimi and Kevin Shield, and frequently cited work by Jürgen Rehm. Shield and Rehm were also authors of the ICCPUD study, and both are senior scientists at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Institute for Mental Health Policy Research. The overlap, the report suggested, indicated a predetermined finding rather than a novel study.
However, “no amount of alcohol consumption is safe” is not one of the conclusions of the ICCPUD study. The Comer-led report also does not dispute the study’s actual findings.
It’s kind of obvious it was a political hack job,” Naimi said.
The panel was not biased. We are all widely respected scientists who posted all of our sources of research support very transparently. We all work in public health, so, of course, we work with public health organizations. And those organizations are interested in reducing harms from alcohol, not anti-alcohol industry per se. This was a study about looking at health impacts, which health scientists know something about.”
Tim Naimi, director, Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, University of Victoria
Naimi and Martinez rejected the claim that the ICCPUD study predetermined that no amount of alcohol consumption is safe.
Big Alcohol Buying Influence
Since February 2022, Comer’s campaign has received roughly $53,000 from Brown-Forman, Molson Coors, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, Pernod Ricard, Sazerac, Suntory Global Spirits and the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, according to Federal Election Committee data.
In March 2025, he was awarded DISCUS’ Top Shelf Award, “given to an elected official for outstanding public policy work benefiting the spirits industry.” Comer’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In October 2024, more than 100 members of Congress, including Comer, sent a
bipartisan letter to HHS and USDA leadership, requesting a suspension of the ICCPUD
study pending the completion of the NASEM review. Far and away more than any state,
the signees consisted of 21 lawmakers from California, home to the country’s largest
cluster of breweries and distilleries. During the 2024 election cycle, five of the 20
members of Congress who received the most money from alcohol-industry lobbying
represent California, according to OpenSecrets. Four of those, Mike Thompson, John
Duarte, Jimmy Panetta and David Valadao, signed the letter.
About Our Guest Expert
Alex Streinger is a journalist covering alcohol policy, public health and corporate accountability.
Alex is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and this piece is part of his master’s thesis.
You can follow Alex’s work on LinkedIn.
