New U.S. dietary guidelines recommend that men should not have more than one alcoholic drink daily, The Wall Street Journal reports. Currently, the recommended limit is two drinks a day.
The two-drink limit was recommended based on research linking moderate drinking with a lower risk of heart disease. More recently, health experts have found problems with those studies.
“We looked at deaths from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and more than 60 alcohol-related conditions,” said Timothy Naimi, a physician and alcohol researcher at Boston University, who served on the federal committee that revised the guidelines. “Whatever kind of study you look at, two drinks a day is associated with a higher risk of death than drinking one drink a day. In the context of a health document, why would you endorse people drinking up to a level in which mortality increases?”
The old and new guidelines recommend that women have no more than one alcoholic drink daily.