Researchers are recommending people have no more than one alcoholic drink per day, after finding no protective impact of alcohol consumption on health.
The risk of death attributable to alcohol was at least one in 1,000 among men and women who consume more than seven drinks a week, and increased to one in 100 for consumption exceeding 8.5 drinks per week, Katherine Keyes, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and coauthors said in the new paper.
Even moderate drinking, or one drink a day, was linked to elevated risk of death from causes such as liver cirrhosis and oral cancer.
“Alcohol consumption, including at what may be perceived as ‘moderate’ levels, is associated with increased mortality and morbidity risks,” the authors said. “These results support tightening alcohol use guidance in the United States, for both males and females, to no more than 1 drink per day.”
The paper was published by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs on June 8, about 18 months after the government released a draft.
It was commissioned during the Biden administration to inform an update to the national dietary guidelines.
That updated guidelines were released in 2026 under the second Trump administration.
The last version of the guidelines recommended no more than two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women. In contrast, the new version did not specify a number of drinks. It said people should “consume less alcohol for better overall health.”
Robert Vincent, who oversaw work on the study and has since been terminated by the government, said in an accompanying editorial on June 8 that the study was sidelined and notably absent from the new dietary guidelines.
So was a separate report that was requested by Congress to assist with updating the guidelines. Conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and released in 2024, that report found that moderate alcohol consumption was linked to health benefits, such as lower all-cause mortality.
That report carried out meta-analyses of studies to determine how alcohol intake affected the risk of dying, being obese, and developing health problems such as cancer.
Researchers behind the newly published paper, which was requested by federal health officials, utilized data from national surveys and previously published research to model the impact of drinking on mortality and morbidity.
They estimated that the lifetime risk of death attributable to alcohol was one in 1,000 for people who drank more than seven drinks a week.
That risk rose to one in 100 for people consuming more than 8.5 drinks a week, and to about one in 25 persons who drank 14 drinks on a weekly basis.
A standard drink was defined as 13.6 grams of alcohol, or 12 ounces of beer or 5 ounces of wine or a 1.5 ounce shot of distilled spirits.
Alcohol-attributable deaths included car crashes and suicides.
“This study’s evidence indicates that many health risks increase at a consumption level of 1 drink per day,” the researchers said. “Importantly, health risks are not uniform and vary substantially by drinking patterns, individual characteristics, and context, meaning that some people may experience harm at levels of consumption lower than those reported in this study. Public health guidance should aim to capture this nuance by emphasizing graduated risk and informed choice alongside a potential population-level thresh-old of 1 drink per day.”
Limitations included an inability to differentiate among types of alcohol and other aspects of drinking behavior, such as speed of drinking or whether drinks are consumed with food.
Authors declared no conflicts of interest.