The dregs of former President Joe Biden's governmental campaign against alcohol were washed away last week, as the US Congress moved to defund a federal agency that the Biden administration attempted to use to declare all alcohol consumption unsafe.
A new version of the US Dietary Guidelines for Adults is supposed to be issued by the end of 2025. We still don't known what these guidelines will recommend about alcohol use – or if they will mention alcohol at all.
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But the neo-prohibitionist movement in the US suffered a major defeat last week, and that is good news for the beleaguered wine industry, as well as restaurants and other businesses that rely on wine and spirits sales.
"If the reporting is correct that the Trump administration is moving away from an anti-business and anti-science approach to alcohol consumption, then this is a very good thing," said Tom Wark, executive director of the National Association of Wine Retailers.
"The best and most responsible message the US Dietary Guidelines can offer is to drink in moderation, just as it has for decades. Wine retailers are the canaries in the coal mine when irresponsible government pronouncements meant to kill off industries are issued. Everyone benefits if this administration takes the responsible path and advocates for moderation."
This is what happened last week: the US Congress shot down a report on adult drinking that the Biden administration commissioned from ICCPUD – the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking.
ICCPUD never had any business determining how much alcohol adults can safely drink, but the Biden administration gave it the assignment to do so. ICCPUD put in place an underqualified six-person committee that included three Canadian addiction specialists.
Congress found out about this in 2023 and asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to prepare a legitimate report summarizing the latest research on alcohol and health. NASEM used 14 experts in different fields of medicine and had its report reviewed before publication by 10 different experts (including a Canadian prohibitionist). The NASEM report is simply more credible.
The NASEM report concluded that while binge drinking and alcoholism are dangerous, moderate drinking reduces all-cause mortality – your overall risk of death. In a nutshell, while moderate drinking raises your risk of several types of cancer, notably breast cancer, it also reduces your risk of heart disease, which is the number one killer of Americans.
Last Monday, the House Appropriations Committee issued a press release that said, among other things, that it was defunding ICCPUD "which the Biden Administration improperly used to carry out activities related to adult alcohol consumption". The defunding still must be passed by Congress and signed into law by the President.
On Friday, Vox reported that three authors of the discredited ICCPUD study complained to the publication that their report will not be published.
That still leaves open the question of what the new dietary guidelines will say. In May, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a US House committee that the new guidelines would be issued before August and would be four pages long – the 2020 guidelines are 160 pages long – and would say "eat the food that's good for you". It's now September and still no guidelines.
In June, Reuters claimed in a story with no named sources that the dietary guidelines would not include a specific statement on how much alcohol is safe to drink. Wine-Searcher has not previously reported on the Reuters story because we did not trust its use of unnamed sources.
It's RFK Jr. and the Trump administration. We don't know what they're going to do about the guidelines; they may not yet know themselves. They could do literally anything.
The US dietary guidelines are more important than you might think. You can prove it with an Internet search. Ask your search engine "how much alcohol is safe to drink"? Most of the top search results quote the current US Dietary Guidelines standards of one drink per day for women and two for men.
Biden made more than one attempt at changing the scientific consensus on moderate drinking. Less than three weeks before Biden left office, his outgoing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a health-warning label on alcohol. That recommendation has so far been ignored.
Blame Canada
Journalist Felicity Carter has shown the links between Movendi, a temperance organization founded in the 1850s, and the World Health Organization, which has also ignored science in its own anti-alcohol campaign.
It's important to understand how the perspective of neo-Prohibitionists differs from that of people who drink in moderation. To most Wine-Searcher readers, there's a difference between having a glass of Bordeaux with dinner and drinking gin out of the bottle on Skid Row. To neo-Prohibitionists there isn't. You can tell by the language: people don't "drink" alcohol, they "use" it.
Neo-Prohibitionists approach wine purely from the perspective of addiction. There is validity to their concern. At a public health level, one of the biggest risks of alcohol is that a certain percentage of people will become alcoholics, like Joe Biden's son Hunter. The problem with neo-Prohibitionists is that they treat all of us as alcoholics. We are not all Hunter Biden.
In North America, Movendi's battle against alcohol started in Canada, where an addiction researcher it has provided with free travel, Tim Naimi, helped write a recommendation for the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction in 2023 that said any more than two drinks a week is unsafe. That recommendation was rejected by the Canadian government but has been falsely reported in many media outlets as Canada's official guidelines.
Naimi was one of three Canadian addiction specialists on the six-person ICCPUD committee, raising the question of why ICCPUD felt the need to go outside the US for experts when the US has about 20 times as many PhDs as Canada.
"When two government agencies put out studies with 180-degrees opposite views, using existing science as a support and nothing new, that’s not science. It’s all about politics," said Rob McMillan, executive vice president of Silicon Valley Bank's wine division. "The task today is to sort out who is closer to the truth.
"The prior administration tried to ram through the ICCPUD report that was purposefully given to an anti-alcohol group within the government, so the outcome was preordained."
Now we still don't know what the Dietary Guidelines will say, but at least there is a better chance they will be guided by science.
