NASEM Finds Moderate Drinking Healthy In Some Circumstances

The US Congress allocated $1.3 million to the Department of Agriculture and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to study alcohol’s impact on consumer health, and those findings were published earlier this week in the Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health.

Takeaways from the National Academies report include:

• Moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared to no alcohol consumption.
• Moderate drinking is also associated with a lower risk of “all-cause mortality”, though heavy drinking increases such risks.
• The existing recommendations of limiting drinking to 2 drinks a day for men and 1 for women are reasonable and safe guidelines for consumer enjoyment of alcohol.

Stephen Kent of the Consumer Choice Center praised the National Academies’ process to research on alcohol, saying, “There has been intense downward pressure by anti-alcohol activists within the World Health Organization (WHO) to steer government recommendations against any and all consumption of alcohol at responsible levels. Consumers rely on unbiased government research to inform their dietary choices and NASEM delivered on their Congressionally backed mandate to review alcohol’s impact on individual health.”

Kent refers to the controversial WHO report from 2023 that declared that no level of alcohol consumption was compatible with good health. That report was not new, however, and certain corners of the international health policy community were beating the “no level of drinking is safe” drum as far back as 2018.

The Biden Administration’s Health and Human Services (HHS) also launched its own health study on alcohol, not sanctioned by Congress, through the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking. Consumer advocates and 100 Congressmen expressed concern that the HHS report lacked basic transparency and independence from activists seeking to discourage Americans from drinking alcohol.

Issues of health and diet are rarely settled, and the push and pull is often down to different industries pushing different agendas. The classic example is Sugar versus Fat and the role that decades long clash over what was worse for you shaped the American food market and diet.