What the New Dietary Guidelines Say About Alcohol

And what older adults should know about moderate drinking

Kristen Fischer,

AARP

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Published January 23, 2026

variety of glassware filled with different alcoholic beverages, including red wine, white wine, and sparkling wine, arranged against a white background

Jamie Chung/Trunk Archive

When the new dietary guidelines were announced earlier this month, they included suggestions on certain foods to eat — like protein and vegetables — and recommendations on foods to limit, such as added sugar. Unlike previous editions, what they didn’t specify was a limit on how much alcohol you can consume.

The 2020-2025 guidelines set moderate drinking limits at two drinks or less a day for men and one drink or less a day for women. But the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans simply say to “consume less alcohol for better health.”

The previous limits were “imperfect but useful as a risk-communication tool,” says Johannes Thrul, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “ ‘Drink less’ is directionally correct, but without numbers it’s harder for people to translate guidance into behavior.”

Priscilla Martinez-Matyszczyk, a scientist and deputy scientific director of the Public Health Institute's Alcohol Research Group in Emeryville, California, agrees, saying that “not having anything specific is unhelpful.” She says the “two a day in men” guidance should have been reduced based on evidence that moderate drinking carries harm, adding that other countries have more stringent guidelines.

Asked for comment, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) referred AARP to the current guidelines. A Department of Agriculture (USDA) spokesperson told AARP via email that the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine concluded that less alcohol is better for overall health and that specific populations (like pregnant women) should completely avoid it.

Lower-risk drinking

So how much can you drink without raising your risk for diseases like cancer? Risk for complications from alcohol generally go up with age, especially as chronic conditions and medication use rise, though individual health status matters more than an exact age or the decade you’re in, Thrul says.

From a health perspective, the lowest-risk option is not drinking, says Thrul, who advises not to start drinking for health reasons if you’ve never had alcohol. “If someone does drink, lower and less frequent is always better because risk rises with dose,” he adds.

Think about drinking in terms of reducing harm from alcohol, he explains. That is, “drink less overall, drink less often, avoid binges, don’t use alcohol for sleep or anxiety, and avoid mixing it with sedating medications,” Thrul says.

If you stick to the “two a day in men” limit, there are “potential health harms even at that level,” says Dr. Ned Calonge, an associate dean for public health practice and an associate professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health. He is also a professor of family medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

“Put the risks of alcohol in perspective,” says Dr. Randall S. Stafford, a professor of medicine and director of the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Program on Prevention Outcomes and Practices.

If your background personal risk is low (no conditions that increase the harms of alcohol), it may be acceptable to drink at a low level if this truly increases your quality of life, he adds.

The new rules of drinking

Although the new guidelines don’t set specific limits, other government agencies do have recommendations. Referring to the 2020-2025 dietary guidelines, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) says to limit drinking to:

Two drinks a day (in men) and one drink a day (in women) on a single day, not on average. This may reduce — but doesn’t eliminate — risks, the NIAAA says.
If you’re over 65, restrict yourself to no more than one drink a day and no more than seven per week, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs recommends.

Make sure to check out a standard drink chart to see if your estimations about what you drink are accurate, as beverages often have more alcohol than you may think, the NIAAA notes.

If you do drink regularly, you can reduce your risk of becoming drunk and experiencing harmful health effects by eating or drinking water when you have alcohol to lower the rate of its absorption. Also, opting for a drink with a lower percentage of alcohol means you’re taking in less alcohol, which can put you at a lower risk, says Martinez-Matyszczyk.

“Even at low levels of risk, you are increasing your risk of something, either of an alcohol-related death or an alcohol-related disease,” she says. That said, if you enjoy a glass of wine on your birthday and don’t drink regularly, it’s an even lower risk compared with a glass per day.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads up the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said in a briefing that he doesn’t think people should drink but realizes that alcohol is a social tool.

“If you look at the blue zones, for example, around the world, where people live the longest, alcohol is sometimes part of their diet. Again, small amounts taken very judiciously and usually in a celebratory fashion,” he said.

Alcohol and age

“As we age, alcohol produces stronger and longer-lasting effects due to changes in body composition, metabolism and brain sensitivity,” Thrul says.

For older adults, it isn’t just about intoxication but also downstream effects like poorer sleep, increased fall risk, medication interactions and higher vulnerability to heart rhythm problems, he says. “Those risks accumulate even with relatively low levels of drinking.”

In general, and for all ages, the evidence increasingly shows drinking is linked to fewer health benefits and clearer harms, Thrul says.

Who should skip alcohol

Like the earlier version of the dietary guidelines, the 2025-2030 report says you shouldn’t drink if:

You’re pregnant
You have a medical condition or take medicine that can interact with alcohol
You’re recovering from an alcohol use disorder
You can’t control how much you drink

Those with a family history of alcoholism should be mindful of alcohol consumption and addictive behaviors, the new guidelines state.

Thrul says that people with liver disease, atrial fibrillation and a high fall risk shouldn’t drink. Additionally, you should avoid alcohol if you take sedatives like benzodiazepines, sleep medications, opioids, muscle relaxants or certain diabetes and blood-thinning medications.

The risks of drinking

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIAAA define a standard drink as having 14 grams, 18 milliliters or 0.6 ounces of ethanol, or alcohol. That’s about 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of hard liquor.

According to the CDC, drinking too much raises your risk of getting sick, injured or an earlier death — and drinking in moderation can lower these risks.

A 2023 report in JAMA Network Open on 107 existing studies didn’t show a significant reduction in the risk of dying from any cause in men who had less than 44 grams of alcohol per day (about three drinks) and in women who had under 25 grams of alcohol per day (about two drinks), compared with those who never drank. The risk went up over those thresholds.

While some research points to alcohol’s potential benefits with regard to cardiovascular health (though other evidence refutes it), the “narrow benefits are completely overwhelmed by the harms of drinking,” Stafford says.

Age-related conditions such as diabetes, fatty liver disease, high blood pressure and a history of cancer increase the level of harm even from low-level alcohol intake, he explains.

Recent research linking alcohol to cancer — especially breast cancer in women — suggests that setting maximum levels “should be reconsidered and potentially lowered,” Stafford adds.

Arriving at the latest guidelines

The dietary guidelines are published jointly every five years by the USDA and HHS.

A 2023 act required that USDA (in consultation with the HHS secretary at the time) form an ad hoc committee with NASEM to review research on moderate drinking and health outcomes, including types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, all-cause mortality, neurocognitive health and lactation.

The studies they used were limited to specific time spans. They looked at drinkers and those who never drank, but not at those who may not currently drink but have in the past, explains Calonge, who led the NASEM committee.

The final 2025-2030 dietary guidelines state that the alcohol guidance was based solely on the NASEM report, which found:

Drinking moderately, compared with never having alcohol, is linked with a higher risk of breast cancer, along with lower all-cause mortality, which is the deaths in a population from any cause.
Drinking moderately is associated with a lower risk of death from heart disease, compared with never drinking, but that only shows an association and doesn’t necessarily mean that drinking moderately causes less death, Calonge says.

In 2022, an arm of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration asked the Public Health Institute’s Alcohol Research Group to study alcohol consumption and health outcomes to inform the dietary guidelines. Those findings linked alcohol with an increased risk for seven types of cancer, saying that women have a greater risk of an alcohol-attributable cancer. But that report wasn’t used in the final 2025-2030 guidelines.

Research on alcohol and health is “imperfect,” Calonge explains, because of a lack of standardization, along with mostly observational data. For more definitive results, you would need a randomized control trial, he says.

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Kristen Fischer is a contributing writer at AARP based at the Jersey Shore. She has also written for Health, WebMD, and McKnights and is the author of Zoo Zen: A Yoga Story for Kids.