Americans should limit their alcohol consumption to no more than one drink per day, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
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The recommendation — from an international team of scientists — differs from the U.S. dietary guidelines, both past and present. Previous guidelines recommended a daily limit of two alcoholic drinks for men and one for women. The latest version, released by the Trump administration in January, is less precise. It recommends only that Americans “consume less alcohol for better overall health.”
The current less-is-best message is accurate but too vague, said study co-author Priscilla Martinez-Matyszczyk, deputy scientific director of the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute, an independent nonprofit organization in California. People need quantified guidance so they can make informed decisions about their drinking, she said.
Martinez-Matyszczyk is part of a team of American, Canadian and British scientists that was asked in 2022 to review alcohol research to help the federal government write the latest dietary guidelines, which are updated every five years by the Agriculture and Health and Human Services departments.
The Biden administration released the scientists’ report in January 2025, but its findings were sidelined under the Trump administration, according to an editorial published alongside the study from Robert Vincent, a former associate administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in a statement that the “guidelines are informed by the totality of the scientific record, not any single report or analysis.”
While the scientists’ 2025 report detailed the health risks of alcohol, it did not include specific guidance for a maximum number of drinks per day. That was left to the government. The new paper — which is not government policy — does both.
The scientists looked at 56 systematic reviews of the relationship between alcohol and health and applied those findings to mortality data in the United States.
They found that men who consumed more than 6.5 drinks per week and women who consumed more than seven drinks per week had greater than a 1-in-1,000 lifetime risk of dying from an alcohol-related disease or injury. The risk jumps to greater than 1 in 100 for both sexes if they have more than 8.5 drinks a week. At 14 drinks a week, Americans’ lifetime risk climbs to 1 in 25.
“One in 25 is a very high risk,” said Jürgen Rehm, a senior scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto and a paper co-author.
The study found that a daily drink was linked to an increased risk of dying from liver cirrhosis, several cancers — oral, pharyngeal, laryngeal, esophageal, colon and liver for men and women and breast cancer in women — and injuries compared with people who never drink, but linked to a lower risk of dying from ischemic stroke and ischemic heart disease. That protective effect is canceled out, however, by occasional binge drinking.
On net, the harms of injuries, cancers and other diseases far outweigh any benefits to the heart, Martinez-Matyszczyk said.
“The important message here is that it is a myth that [drinking] is healthy,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, who wasn’t involved with the research. “There are quite a few people who still think you live longer if you drink one or two drinks a day.”
The American Cancer Society recommends that people who opt to consume alcohol limit themselves to one drink per day for women and one or two drinks per day for men. But “for optimal cancer prevention, it is best to avoid alcohol completely,” Dr. William Dahut, the society’s chief scientific officer, wrote in an email.
“Those at highest risk for cancer or cancer recurrence should be very cautious about alcohol consumption,” Dahut said.
Rehm, of the University of Toronto, said the team’s findings are based on mortality patterns for an entire population, and each person must assess their own risk.
“If I’m coming from a family where my father, mother, grandfather and grandmother all died from heart disease, I may choose to drink one drink every other day to protect my heart,” Rehm said. “But if I’m coming from a family where most family members died of cancer, I may think very differently.”
