Improbably, Joe Biden is still running the process for creating the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for alcohol. Congress tried but failed to get his administration to follow the law last year. Now, Congress is trying again with a new President.
The stakes are high. If the Biden appointees get their way, and the Dietary Guidelines for Adults say what teetotalling Biden wants – that no amount of alcohol is safe to drink – it would be devastating not just for the liquor industry, but for restaurants and possibly the US economy as a whole.
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This is not exaggeration. When Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to end the Great Depression, one of his first steps was to end Prohibition. Not only did that put breweries and wineries back to work, hiring thousands of workers; it sent Americans out to legal restaurants and bars instead of speakeasies. It revitalized the economy.
To be clear, Biden is not himself sitting in a Washington office attempting to convince Americans, against all evidence, that moderate drinking is bad for us.
But the secretive committee he put in place to do just that is still operating. And Congress has just asked them – again – to stop.
James Comer (R-Ky), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a blistering letter this week to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The letter explains the perfidy of the Biden Administration on the issue, and asks HHS to respond to Congress' questions. Biden never did.
"The Biden Administration obstructed the Committee’s request for information and evaded the Committee’s oversight by providing only documents already publicly available," Comer's letter reads. "After months of noncompliance, the Committee subpoenaed outstanding documents and communications from HHS and USDA. Despite duly authorized subpoenas, the Biden Administration ran out the clock and did not provide sufficient information to the Committee."
Digging deep
Here is the background. The US dietary guidelines for adults are updated every five years; they are supposed to be updated by the end of 2025.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) is required by Congress to provide guidance on the dietary guidelines regarding alcohol. NASEM appointed 14 experts in different fields including nutrition, public health, reproductive endocrinology, psychiatry, epidemiology and emergency medicine. Their work was reviewed before publication by 10 experts.
But at the same time, the Biden administration had ICCPUD – the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking – secretly appoint a six-person committee to produce its own report. The ICCPUD panel had three addiction specialists, an epidemiologist from Columbia University, an anesthesiologist from the Mayo Clinic, and a generic "scientist" funded by a group attempting to get young women to drink less. The credentials of the NASEM panel, as well as the depth of its knowledge, were just obviously better.
The NASEM report concluded that while binge drinking and alcoholism are dangerous, moderate drinking reduces all-cause mortality – in other words, your overall risk of death. ICCPUD, meanwhile, used its non-specialist panel to conclude what Biden wanted to conclude: that any level of drinking alcohol is bad for you.
Legally, the dietary guidelines should follow the NASEM report, and the ICCPUD report shouldn't exist at all. But Wine-Searcher reported that a scientist from the ICCPUD panel who specializes in tobacco, not alcohol, announced at a trade meeting that he is the lead author of the alcohol dietary guidelines.
"As HHS works alongside USDA to finalize the 2025 Dietary Guidelines, it is imperative that Congress and the American people have the utmost confidence in the scientific support determining the Dietary Guidelines," Comer's letter reads. "The National Nutrition Monitoring Act requires the Dietary Guidelines to be “based on the preponderance of the scientific and medical knowledge which is current at the time the report is prepared.”"
Comer asked HHS for a staff briefing on the status of the alcohol guidelines. He also asked that HHS deliver a number of documents to his committee that Biden refused to produce, including:
* All documents and communications among or between HHS staff related to the formation of the ICCPUD Subcommittee for Alcohol Intake and Health to review alcohol consumption and health for the 2025 Dietary Guidelines.
* All documents and communications containing meeting minutes, presentations, memos, or notes of the ICCPUD’s Subcommittee for Alcohol Intake and Health’s meetings.
* All drafts or iterations of drafts of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans referencing alcoholic beverage consumption.
* A complete list of staff drafting the alcohol consumption recommendations for the 2025 Dietary Guidelines, identified by title and subagency, office, and/or department.
Comer asked for the documents to be delivered to his committee by May 12. If Biden were still in charge, that would not happen. But, in theory, Biden is not still in charge. So we'll see.
