As the story of the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans unfolds, state and local policymakers take note. The sordid tale of the alcohol industry’s “success” in shaping the Guidelines should make clear where the responsibility now lies for providing accurate, unbiased information about alcohol’s health risks. State legislatures and city councils face formidable resistance from Big Alcohol, but they have powerful tools at their disposal to fight for consumers.

The federal government has abdicated that fight. As reporting out of Reuters revealed yesterday, officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were poised this past spring to halve the recommended limit for alcohol consumption for men to one drink a day. Their proposal for the new Guidelines also included the statement “Alcohol is known to cause cancer.” When the new Guidelines came out earlier this week, however, they omitted any reference to cancer, and scrapped the “moderate drinking” limits altogether.

For many, the omission will freeze in place the scientifically dubious “2 drink per day” limit that the first Trump Administration embraced over its experts’ recommendations. These limits emerged years ago amidst a larger backdrop of bad advice on alcohol in the DGAs, driven by industry-funded, flawed research. The 2005 Guidelines, for example, stated: “Alcohol may have beneficial effects when consumed in moderation. The lowest all-cause mortality occurs at an intake of one to two drinks per day.” This was misleading because alcohol can also have harmful effects when consumed in moderation—most significantly by increasing cancer risk. Indeed, even industry affiliated researchers acknowledge the evidence that “moderate” drinking significantly increases cancer risk, while the evidence that alcohol decreases cardiovascular risk—the main purported benefit of light drinking—is disputed.

Cancer risk aside, researchers, including many derided as “anti-alcohol,” have noted a “J-shaped risk curve” in observational studies that suggests “protective associations at low doses with increasing risk at higher doses,” i.e. some beneficial effects of alcohol at low doses. But even assuming that “systematic biases,” such as the “sick quitter” effect, do not account for the all of these observed associations, research looking exclusively at drinkers makes clear that a much lower intake, around two drinks per week on average, is associated with the lowest all-cause mortality among drinkers.

So the new Dietary Guidelines, while technically accurate in directing Americans to “consume less alcohol for better overall health,” fail to set the record straight. And rather than carrying forward the previous DGA’s warning about alcohol attributable cancers—which kill over 20,000 Americans each year—the new Guidelines suggest that consumers without a “family history of alcoholism” need not worry about addiction.

As the Reuters piece recounts, this is the culmination of a long and well-resourced campaign by Big Alcohol, which succeeded in removing its product from the expert review of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, and creating a shamefully conflicted and unqualified body within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). The resulting report’s flaws came into stark relief thanks in part to a study commissioned by the Biden Administration’s Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD), which issued its report around the same time as the NASEM study.

The industry’s allies in Congress, led by Rep. James Comer, ultimately convinced the Trump Administration to shelve the ICCPUD report, advancing a theory that the ICCPUD study was “fraught with bias” because (gasp) the ICCPUD study group members “had conducted previous research linking negative health outcomes with alcohol.” In other words, they were qualified in the relevant field. One need only peruse the report put out by Rep. Comer’s office this week, with its cheesy graphics and nonsensical allegations of “deceptive” practices (some of the ICCPUD researchers had worked with the Canadian government to develop guidance on moderate drinking and they “reached very similar conclusions”!), to get an idea of the intellectual integrity motivating this campaign.

Unfortunately, alcohol lobbyists have found a receptive audience on both sides of the aisle in Congress. Some twenty-five Democratic representatives joined Comer in a July 12, 2024 letter seeking to pressure HHS leaders to curtail the ICCPUD study. Perhaps most depressing, the Reuters piece explains that the appropriations rider establishing the crank NASEM committee originated with Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, whose office said “the legislation was written with input from several lawmakers but that she stood by funding the study as ‘sound science necessary to inform public health guidelines.’” I guess this is what counts for accountability in Congress these days. According to Reuters, lobbying disclosures show lobbyists for Molson Coors, headquartered in Wisconsin, and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, petitioned lawmakers on Baldwin’s bill in 2022.

As long as Congress remains captured by the industry, many effective policies to reduce harms from alcohol will not come to fruition. These include policies like stopping the further erosion of the federal excise tax on alcohol, or as the Surgeon General recently recommended, putting a cancer warning on alcoholic beverage labels. But state and local elected officials do not need to wait to protect their constituents from the alcohol industry’s excesses.

One of the most egregious of these excesses comes in the form of advertising. In 2017, researchers noted that six of the top 100 advertisers in the world, as measured by marketing expenditures, are alcohol companies (by contrast, not a single company in the highly regulated tobacco industry ranks among the top 100 advertisers). Alcohol companies have increasingly turned this investment towards the digital space, where algorithms enable them to nudge underage consumers towards “drinking at hazardous levels” and other behaviors that make money for their stockholders.

State and local law cannot ban this advertising outright, but they can require alcohol sellers to warn consumers about the health risks associated with their product. In particular, they can require a warning statement such as: “According to the U.S. Surgeon General, drinking alcohol increases the risk of developing cancer, including breast and colon cancers.”

This kind of law can both serve to promote awareness of the fact that alcohol is the third leading modifiable risk factor for deadly cancers (ahead of sun exposure!), and help to beat back the Big Alcohol marketing machine. Our CFA white paper on the topic elaborates.

Unconstrained, Big Alcohol’s relentless profit drive will continue to drive tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of deaths each year, even as more consumers turn away from alcohol altogether. The industry’s financial contributions may have numbed Congress and federal regulators to consumers’ pain, but state and local government leaders should have more difficulty ignoring the impact of industry written policies on their constituents. The time has come for state and local elected officials to use their considerable power to fight back against the alcohol industry on behalf of consumers.