“Drink Up!” Says a Heavily Lobbied FDA
The Food and Drug Administration has relaxed guidelines on the health effects of alcohol consumption. Much more than any new scientific findings, the move reflects a yearslong lobbying effort by the alcohol industry.
Current research says that no amount of alcohol consumption is good for your health. The federal government, lobbied intensely by booze manufacturers, is now using FDA guidelines to suggest otherwise. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
When the federal government blindsided public health experts last week by eliminating its long-standing warning that Americans should only consume one or two alcoholic drinks per day, alcohol industry lobbyists acted as surprised as anybody.
A top executive at the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, which represents companies like Bacardi and Stoli, told the New York Times that she didn’t know of any industry groups lobbying to eliminate the recommended drinking limits, which have been in place since the country’s first dietary guidelines in 1980.
Left unmentioned were the millions that the Distilled Spirits Council and other alcohol lobbyists have recently spent on the dietary guidelines and other issues. The struggling booze industry has been tossed a lifeline from Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Department of Health and Human Services, which is now simply urging people to “consume less alcohol for better overall health” and has eliminated public warnings that even moderate consumption is linked to cancer and other health risks.
These warnings against excessive alcohol use are typically used to inform scientific studies, offer guidance for medical providers and the public, and distinguish between moderate and heavy alcohol consumption.
The Distilled Spirits Council spent more than $2 million lobbying on the dietary guidelines in the first three quarters of 2025, and another nearly $4 million the year before. The Beer Institute, another major lobbying group, spent more than $2 million to influence the government in the first three quarters of 2025 on issues including “dietary guidelines.” Some major alcohol producers like Miller Lite’s parent company, Molson Coors, and whiskey maker Johnnie Walkers’ parent company, Diageo, started lobbying on the 2025 guidelines as early as 2021.
Whether or not these lobbyists expected health regulators to eliminate drinking limits altogether, they were evidently pleased with the result.
More than twenty of the alcohol industry’s top trade associations, including the Beer Institute and the Distilled Spirits Council, also signed a coalition statement welcoming the change issued by Science Over Bias, an industry group advocating for a reevaluation of alcohol’s regulation under the FDA.
“The Dietary Guidelines’ long-standing, overarching advice is that if alcohol is consumed, it should be done in moderation,” the group wrote. “These updated guidelines, underpinned by the preponderance of scientific evidence, reaffirm this important guidance.”
The Beer Institute called the FDA’s new guidelines “an important milestone.” The National Association of Wine Retailers said in a statement that“Moderate consumption has long been the foundation of the proper relationship with alcohol, and we are very pleased to see that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not succumb to the call by extremist anti-alcohol groups to throw the idea of moderate consumption under the bus.”
The new recommendations also eliminate a past warning in the guidelines that “Emerging evidence suggests that even drinking within the recommended limits may increase the overall risk of death from various causes, such as from several types of cancer and some forms of cardiovascular disease.”
If anything, evidence linking alcohol and cancer has mounted since the last edition of the dietary guidelines, and in January 2025, President Joe Biden’s surgeon general released a new advisory on the issue, noting that drinking was the third leading preventable cause of cancer, after tobacco and obesity. Members of the FDA’s dietary guidelines board coauthored a review of studies from 2010 to 2020 that tentatively suggested low-level alcohol consumption is associated with a lower risk of death when compared to never drinking.
But a growing body of population-level studies and clinical research have questioned such findings, suggesting instead that even moderate drinking has mostly detrimental health effects. In 2023, the World Health Organization concluded that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.
Thanks to these health concerns and changing drinking habits, alcohol manufacturers have lost $830 billion in global market value since 2021.
The alcohol industry has also gone to war with the cannabis industry, blaming legalized marijuana for people’s declining interest in alcohol.
They’ve also taken aim at young people’s allegedly antisocial, teetotaling tendencies for their disappearing clientele. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, echoed that point at a press conference about the new guidelines when he called alcohol a “social lubricant” that brings people together in an increasingly lonely country.
“It does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way,” said Oz.