Exclusive: US to drop guidance to limit alcohol to one or two drinks per day, sources say
June 18 (Reuters) - U.S. Dietary Guidelines are expected to eliminate the long-standing recommendation that adults limit alcohol consumption to one or two drinks per day, according to three sources familiar with the matter, in what could be a major win for an industry threatened by heightened scrutiny of alcohol's health effects.
The updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which could be released as early as this month, are expected to include a brief statement encouraging Americans to drink in moderation or limit alcohol intake due to associated health risks, the sources said.
The guidelines are still under development and subject to change, two of the sources and a fourth individual familiar with the process said.
Currently, the recommendations advise limiting drinking to one serving or less per day for women and two or less for men, widely seen as a moderate level.
Similar guidelines exist in countries such as the United Kingdom, which advises limiting drinking to 14 units per week, while Canada, however, has adopted a more cautious stance, warning that health risks begin to increase after just two drinks per week.
Even moderate drinking is linked to some health risks, such as higher risk of breast cancer, though some studies have also found an association with possible health benefits, such as a lower risk of stroke.
The fourth source said that the scientific basis for recommending specific daily limits is limited, and the goal is to ensure the guidelines reflect only the most robust evidence.
The new guidelines, developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are closely watched internationally and influence policies ranging from school lunch programs to medical advice. Neither department responded to requests for comment.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known teetotaler, has remained largely silent on alcohol but has emphasised a focus on whole foods in the upcoming guidelines.
Some alcohol executives had feared a move towards tighter recommendations on alcohol intake as authorities like the World Health Organization upped their warnings about alcohol's health risks.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said alcohol consumption increases the risk of at least seven types of cancer and called for warning labels on alcoholic drinks.
Major industry players, including Diageo (DGE.L), opens new tab and Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI.BR), opens new tab, have lobbied lawmakers throughout the review process. Senate records show each company spent millions on lobbying efforts related to the guidelines and a range of other issues such as tax and trade in 2024 and 2025. Both companies declined to comment.
The new guidelines are set to move away from suggesting consumers limit alcohol consumption to a specific number of daily servings, according to the three sources, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely.
One person said the new alcohol-related recommendation will probably be limited to a sentence or two. Another said the existing numbers tied to moderate drinking could still appear in a longer appendix.
While industry representatives have lobbied lawmakers on the guidelines or how they should be decided, some officials and researchers advocated for tighter restrictions.
Reports intended to inform the guidelines have meanwhile drawn different conclusions about alcohol's health effects and the science around this.
The guidelines, which are reviewed every five years, have advised drinking in moderation and defined that as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two for men since 1990.
Eva Greenthal, a senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit focused on nutrition, health and food safety, said the more general language expected in the guidelines was "so vague as to be unhelpful".
Under such a change, the message that even moderate drinking can increase risks, especially for breast cancer, would get lost, she continued.
Two studies were produced to inform the development of the guidelines. The first found that moderate drinking was associated with increased risk of some cancers, but a decreased risk of dying from any cause and some cardiovascular problems like stroke.
The evidence for some other health impacts was insufficient to draw conclusions, it found.
The other report conversely found the risk of dying from alcohol use, including increased risk for seven cancers, begins at any or low levels of alcohol use and increases with higher consumption.
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The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Putting cancer warnings on alcohol would help me drink less
Back in the early noughties, the indoor smoking ban led to an outcry over 'the nanny state'. The same happened when cigarette advertising was banned, and when manufacturers were required to plaster packs with images of diseased lungs. Yet over the past 40 years, according to Cancer Research, lung cancer rates in men have dropped by around 60 per cent. We may think we crave the rugged freedoms of the Marlboro Man, but given the facts, it turns out we don't actually want to die. And yet when it comes to alcohol, one of the world's biggest killers, a key driver of cancers, heart disease, strokes and obesity, there are no images of rotting livers on the chilled Sauvignon. The presentation of booze in the supermarket aisles is as benign as kitchen roll and chicken pie. It's described on restaurant menus with biblical reverence, it's advertised on TV in a hazy, golden-hour glow, and every other greetings card carries a hilarious reference to the booze-addled nature of the recipient. It is both normalised and celebrated, despite being the fifth greatest risk factor for death in the UK. Now, a group of major medical and health organisations have signed a letter to the Prime Minister calling for alcohol to carry explicit warnings that its consumption can cause cancer. The World Cancer Research Fund, which spearheaded the letter, cited 'shockingly low' public awareness that alcohol raises the risk of seven types of cancer – these being breast, bowel, stomach, head, neck, liver and mouth – and insisted that 'bold and unambiguous labelling' is urgently need to help save lives. Token efforts have long been made by the industry to toe a wavering line of responsibility – the number of units a bottle of wine contains written in a font the size of a gnat's IKEA instructions, or a glancing mention that pregnant women shouldn't drink. According to the Advertising Standards Authority, 'Lively, but responsible, social interaction or party scenes with alcohol present are allowed but…no behaviour may be adolescent or childish.' If only that diktat held true in real-life 'party scenes.' Initially, like much of Gen X and our wine-necking Boomer parents, I was resistant to the idea of cancer warnings. If I wanted to slowly kill myself in a responsible and socially acceptable manner, I felt it should be my choice to do so. But after another night of drinking slightly too much with friends, waking bathed in shame and a light prosecco sweat, I reconsidered. Women, particularly, are at risk of harm from alcohol, simply because we're smaller. If every time I picked up the wine bottle to top up my glass – over a healthy dinner! So civilised! – it reminded me that I was increasing my risk of cancer, I suspect I might put it back down. Humans like to ignore the dangers when it's something we want to do until it becomes impossible to turn a blind eye. But this time, it's not so much the consumers resisting warnings as the enormously powerful drinks industry. It's already up against Gen Z's wellbeing crusade, with a tsunami of kumbucha and kefir washing away the old-school shots and spirits from nights out. The risk of drinkers murmuring, 'Actually, I don't think I do want seven types of cancer' and switching the kettle on instead is a step too far. A spokesperson for the Portman Group, which oversees UK alcohol labelling in the UK, says: 'Whilst we do not dispute the link between alcohol and certain cancers… blanket cancer warning labels…can create unnecessary anxiety, eroding trust in health advice and alienating the very people who require support.' As an argument, this is weaker than a sixth-form debating point scribbled on the bus. Imagine the motor industry saying, 'Road signs create unnecessary anxiety. Let's not warn people that they might crash, lest we alienate drivers.' The spokesperson added that most alcohol products already include advice to limit drinking to 14 units a week, and claimed that 'most people drink within guidelines.' According to NHS Digital, however, 24 per cent of Brits drink more than this, while the charity Drinkaware has found that 32 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women regularly sink more than the recommended limit – and it is a limit, not a target. Doctors repeatedly warn that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, and in April, the World Health Organisation advised that women should drink no alcohol at all to avoid a heightened risk of breast cancer. I'm aware that even reading this is annoying. I share the general British resentment over finger-wagging admonishments from the Fun Police. I want to say, 'You'll prise my Picpoul from my cold, dead hand.' The only thing is, I'd rather not be cold and dead – and I'm increasingly convinced that warning labels can only be a good thing. Although, of course, we must be careful how we approach this new regime. After all, we wouldn't want to alienate anybody.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Can I tame my 4am terrors? Arifa Akbar on a lifetime of insomnia – and a possible cure
I can't remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep. The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound. I have been told that to overcome an inability to sleep you must find its root cause, but this quest for an original impetus is guesswork. Was it self-inflicted in childhood, or does it track further back than that, to infancy, to the womb, to genetics? One starting point is Professor Derk-Jan Dijk's view of a 'sleep personality', and the idea that childhood sleep habits can be the same later in life. I was born in London, but my family moved to Lahore when I was three years old, before returning to the UK a couple of years later. In Pakistan, there was vigorous, carefree slumber, on the roof of the house on the hottest nights, with the extended family in close proximity. It was sleep as communal ritual. Then the standstill after lunch when everyone lay down again in siesta. I remember my sister, Fauzia, sleeping beside me on these afternoons. There was no hint of insomnia until the move back to Britain when we found ourselves homeless, living in a disused building in north London for a while, crammed into a single room, before moving into a council flat. In light of Dijk's words, I see how my insomnia might be a reaction against this early chaos, along with my exacting need for order and silence in adulthood, but that is my own armchair analysis. There are so many gaps in sleep science that I wonder if sleep is by its nature too mysterious to systematise. If science can't explain the grey areas around sleep, maybe art can shed a light. It is surprising, given the painting's sense of joyous night-time, that Van Gogh painted his post-impressionist masterpiece The Starry Night in the midst of depression, after being admitted to an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the summer of 1889. A year before, in a letter dated 16 September 1888, Vincent tells his brother, Theo, that he is doing six to 12 hours of non-stop work, often at night, followed by 12 hours of sleep. By the following year he was in the grip of a 'FEARSOME' insomnia. On 9 January 1889, weeks after slicing part of his ear off in a high state of anxiety, he writes to Theo about his torment. He is fighting sleeplessness with a 'very, very strong dose of camphor' on his pillow and mattress, he says, and he hopes it will bring an end to the insomnia. 'I dare to believe that it won't recur.' I read Van Gogh's hope as optimistic desperation. In my case, it has always returned. Yet, even in his 'insensible' state, Vincent tells Theo that he is reflecting on the work of Degas, Gauguin and his own art practice; he continues to think, paint, write letters, with the insomnia existing alongside his productivity. The glittering night sky Van Gogh imagines beyond the confines of his asylum is an embodiment of the way we so often think of the gifted artist at night: synapses fizzing, imagination touched by divinity, a compulsively unsleeping genius channelling a heightened state of buoyant creativity. Countless artists and writers have elected to work after dark, from Toulouse-Lautrec, documenting night revelries at the Moulin Rouge, to Franz Kafka, Philip Guston and Patricia Highsmith. Musicians, too: the Rolling Stones' all-night jam in the lead-up to their appearance at Knebworth in 1976, for instance; or Prince, whose recording sessions could last across a continuous 24 hours. Certainly, if Van Gogh still suffered from insomnia when he was painting The Starry Night, it makes sleeplessness seem beatific – a curse turned gift. There is none of this buoyancy in Louise Bourgeois's night scribblings. She suffered from sleeplessness throughout her life but faced a particularly debilitating bout of night-time anxiety between 1994 and 1995, during which time she made her Insomnia Drawings series. 'It is conquerable,' she said, and for her it was conquered, by filling page after page of a drawing diary with deliriously repeated doodles and circles within circles, a mess of scribbles that look like screams on paper. They are so different from the enormous stainless steel, bronze and marble spiders and other caged sculptures for which Bourgeois is better known, but I feel a peculiar kind of excitement upon seeing these images, with their agitating boredom and alertness, side by side. The artist Lee Krasner also painted her way through chronic insomnia, around the time her mother and then her husband, the painter Jackson Pollock, died – the latter in a drink-driving car crash in 1956, with his lover Ruth Kligman, who survived, in the seat beside him. Krasner's Night Journeys series has some similarities to Bourgeois's drawings, featuring repeating, abstract patterns, but washed in an earthy sepia brown. The patterns are insect-like, as if ants are crawling across the retina. I am inspired by the images. Rather than seeking escape or avoidance of their sleepless state, Bourgeois and Krasner stare it in the face, and it stares back at them, an abyss of maddening monotony. There has only been one instance in my adult life when sleep became easy. Or rather, it became compulsive – as much as the insomnia was, and perhaps even more disturbing. It happened when Fauzia died in 2016, at the age of 45, of undiagnosed tuberculosis. She had been admitted to hospital with an unknown illness, and lay wired to a ventilator in intensive care. When the hospital called to say she had had a fatal brain haemorrhage one morning, the shock of it was too much to take in. So I began to sleep. No amount was enough and I felt increasingly worried by the long, blank nights, which did not bring relief but became as strangely burdensome as the insomnia had once felt. Haruki Murakami's novel After Dark features two sisters, the younger, Mari, mourning the older sibling, Eri, who is in a coma-like state. The book takes place over a single night in Tokyo as Mari roams through the city, meeting its nocturnal characters: a trombonist, a Chinese sex worker, the manager of a love hotel. All the while Eri lies in a trapped and mysterious kind of sleep. It might be an undiagnosed illness, a psychological condition or even a radical protest at the world and her place in it – we are never sure. Mari refuses to see her sister as 'dead', even though there seems no prospect of Eri's waking up. She looks at her sister's face and thinks that 'consciousness just happens to be missing from it at the moment: it may have gone into hiding, but it must certainly be flowing somewhere out of sight, far below the surface, like a vein of water'. This is how I saw Fauzia as she lay in hospital, after her haemorrhage. Even though we were told she'd remain on a ventilator for 24 hours as a formality before being pronounced dead, I kept watching for her to twitch awake, sure that it would happen. It seemed as if she was in a deep sleep, albeit so submerged by it that she had become unreachable. In her lifetime, Fauzia went through long bouts of oversleeping brought on by depression. There seemed to be a rebellion in it, too. From the age of 19, when she first became seriously depressed, she began holing herself up in her room, sleeping for the night and most of the following day. In the medieval era, the act of daytime sleeping, for men and for women, was seen to harm one's reputation. Many still regard it as slovenly and it can be subversive for exactly this reason. For a woman, especially, to refuse to get up and assume her role in the world – which may be one of monotonous domesticity, of caring for others, or of participating in the tedious, lower-rung machinery of capitalist productivity – might be a defiant act of saying 'no'. What might look like inertia, or passivity, can be an active summoning of inner strength, as suggested by Bruno Bettelheim in his psychoanalytic interpretations of fairytales in The Uses of Enchantment. He speaks of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) not as an example of meek femininity but as an adolescent 'gathering strength in solitude'. Her sleep is a temporary turning inward in order to foment, mobilise and psychically prepare for the battles of adulthood to come. A glassy-eyed, self-medicating woman in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation also 'hibernates' in her New York apartment. She is a Manhattan princess, narcissistic and hard to like, who does not want to experience any of life's sharp edges. Yet there is something I recognise in her overwhelming desire to disconnect from the terrible reality of the world. She plans to sleep for a year and wake up cured of her sadness, and she is. My sleep wasn't a cure, but the oversleeping did eventually lift and leave me feeling less numbed to my own sadness. Now I was glad to be returned to myself, and to my insomnia – an old friend, missed. There is evidence to suggest that women sleep differently from men and feel the effects of insomnia in discrete ways. Professor Dijk cites the familiar list of causes, from lifestyle to social class, wealth and genetics, but he has also found sex-based biological factors, with differences in the brainwaves of women and men when they sleep. Women intrinsically have different circadian rhythms, which are on average six minutes shorter than men's cycles; they experience more deep (or 'slow wave') sleep and may need to sleep for longer; while a mix of social factors, from breastfeeding to lower-paid shift work, means they face higher levels of insomnia. Sleep science makes a significant connection between hormones and sleep for women in the throes of menopause. About 50% of women who suffer with insomnia as they approach menopause are thought to sleep for less than six hours a night. The cumulative effects of this sleeplessness can be so intense that some have questioned whether they might be linked to UK female suicide rates, which are at their highest between the ages of 50 and 54. This brings another kind of insomnia for me, as I turn 50. It creeps duplicitously into my night, so I don't recognise it; I fall asleep quickly but am awake again at 4am with alarm-clock precision. This is not the organic and woozy 'biphasic' interruption believed by some to have been common in the centuries before electric light, in which communities were said to have a first and then a second sleep through the night, getting up to work or chat in between in a brief window referred to as 'the watch'. My brain is pin-sharp, as if the sleep before has been entirely restorative and I am ready to start the day, except there is a move towards a certain line of thought, a search for the faultlines of the previous day, the urgent address of an old argument or decision far in the future. And it is, in its scratchy insistence, so much like Bourgeois's scribbled red balls and Krasner's insects, that I wonder if they were experiencing menopausal sleep disruption while creating their works. Whereas younger insomniacs struggle to fall asleep, those in midlife might doze off quickly but wake up in the middle of the night as a result of hormonal changes, and it is in these 4am 'reckonings' that they encounter the night-time brain, says Dr Zoe Schaedel, who sits on the British Menopause Society's medical advisory council. 'Our frontal lobe [which regulates logical thought] doesn't activate as well overnight, and our amygdala [the brain's command centre for emotions, including fear, rage and anxiety] takes over.' So the very nature of thinking is different at 4am. In the daytime it is primarily logical, but at night we become more rash, anxious, catastrophic. That sets off its own physiological reaction in the nervous system, with a surge of adrenaline and cortisol, as well as rising heart and breathing rates. Between the waking, there is a welter of dreams, so many it seems like someone is changing between the channels on a TV set. Dr Schaedel says this apparent assault of dreams is an illusion. When oestrogen drops, women start sleeping more lightly and waking up in the latter part of the night, in the shallower REM, or dream, phase, which gives the impression of dreaming more because you are waking up more often in the midst of them. Still, I am wrongfooted by this second life in my head, this middle-aged night, as busy, as complicated and as exhausting as the day. When insomnia is at its most agitating, engaging the brain visually may be a way to lull ourselves back to sleep, says Dr Schaedel. This idea makes better sense of Bourgeois's scribbling. Maybe I would find my own recurring patterns on paper if I did the same thing, I think, and so I put a notebook beside my bed. I know I have had a maelstrom of dreams but, when I try to discover them on paper, it is like a stuck sneeze. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more. A few snatched images come back, but far more float out of view, so much unreachable. The next night I can recall even fewer details, although I know I have dreamed heavily. So my odyssey of dreams evades any attempt at codification. They are determined to remain mysterious, on the other side of daytime. This is an edited extract from Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into the Night, published by Sceptre on 3 July at (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Scottish Sun
5 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Ballon d'Or winner Aitana Bonmati, 27, rushed to hospital with viral meningitis days before Euro 2025
Spain's manager has spoken about the midfielder's condition STAR WORRY Ballon d'Or winner Aitana Bonmati, 27, rushed to hospital with viral meningitis days before Euro 2025 BALLON d'Or winner Aitana Bonmati was rushed to hospital after suffering from viral meningitis. The Spanish star did not train on Thursday after reporting a fever. 4 Spain star Aitana Bonmati was rushed to hospital Credit: Reuters 4 She has been diagnosed with viral meningitis Bonmati, 27, was then ruled out of Spain's clash with Japan - which they won 3-1 at the Estadio Municipal de Butarque. The Barcelona star then shocked her 1.9million followers on Instagram with a post of herself in a hospital bed. The midfielder could be seen with an IV in her arm as she watched the match on TV. She added an emoji of a flexing arm to suggest she is fighting strong. Marca have reported that she underwent multiple medical tests and was diagnosed with viral meningitis. She has been treated with intravenous medicine and at the moment, there is no return date pencilled in for her. The report has suggested that there is "confidence" that she will have recovered in time for Spain's Euros campaign. Spain manager Montse Tome is giving Bonmati all the time she needs in order to make the travelling squad. She said: "Aitana is a very important player, and we're going to wait for her until the end. "The only information I have is that we don't know the timeframe. 4 Montse Tome does not know when the midfielder will be back Credit: EPA 4 Bonmati has scored 30 goals for Spain in her career Credit: Getty "If I say anything, I'd be wrong because I'm not a doctor. She's a very important player." Spain travel to Switzerland tomorrow ahead of their Euros opener against Portugal on July 3. Bonmati has earned 76 caps and scored 30 goals in international football. She was a part of the Spain team that beat England's Lionesses in the World Cup final in 2023. She won the women's Ballon d'Or in both 2023 and 2024. In February, Bonmati insisted that Luis Rubiales' conviction of sexual assault after kissing Jenni Hermoso on the mouth was right. The infamous incident happened after Spain won the World Cup in 2023. Bonmati's glittering career Aitana Bonmati has enjoyed an incrediblysuccessful career at club and international levels so far... Club career: Barcelona, 2016 - present Appearances -318 Goals - 112 International career: Spain, 2017 - present Caps - 76 Goals - 30 Catalonia, 2017 - 2019 Cap - 2 Goals - 1 Honours list: Club: Copa de la Reina - x7 Liga F - x6 Supercopa de Espana - x5 Champions League - x3 Copa Catalunya - x4 International: Women's World Cup, 2023 Women's Nations League, 2024 Individual: Women's Ballon d'Or - x2 Best Fifa Women's Player - x2 Golden Player Woman Award - x2 Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year - 2024 The former Spanish Football Federation boss was fined £8,274 but was spared a prison sentence. And she hopes the outcome of the case, which sparked nationwide protests in her country, has set an "important precedent".
