Interesting, softening the guidelines…I have a theory who may have had input on this 
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Maybe RFK is on the board and follows the state of the wine market thread!
Weren’t a bunch of people around here complaining that they were rumored to be classifying any amount of alcohol as “unsafe”?
Now people are upset they went the other way?
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I’d just prefer that the various guidances be based purely on the best available science versus suspecting that there are private bidders or hidden (or not) agendas influencing the guidance.
Science is also imperfect, but properly done, it is unbiased.
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I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the guidance, nor do I think it’ll necessarily change anything.
I think the previous guidance made it seem like if you had less than 2 drinks a day as a man or 1 drink a day as a woman you’d be fine which is certainly not true. I’m not 100% on board with the WHO consensus regarding no safe level as I think the research doesn’t completely support it, so I think it’s not a bad position.
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Check out The Nutrition Coalition. That’s their goal - just make it based on the best possible science.
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Wine spectator’s take “neither neoprohibitionists nor the wine industry will be happy with the new guidelines” lol, sounds like they’re about right.
There was no point in reading after I saw guidelines announced by the Trump administration. No credibility.
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Or you could actually look at the actual guidelines, which make much more sense than the previous guidelines. Their new food guidelines were quite good too.
The whole alcohol screening thing in medicine is a joke. The general rule for practitioners was multiplying reported intake by 3. The new guidance makes advising patients easier and doesn’t give them a permission slip to drink x drinks a day and think they’re fine.
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Do you know of a good link to something that should convince me it’s time to “end the war on saturated fat”?
https://www.jacc.org/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.05.077
I think the evidence that a cap on saturated fat is not required is pretty strong.
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Here is a short comment on the fact that the 10% cap was left in place, as well as a good link to recent papers and research.
" The 10% cap was supported by “no data,” according to emails obtained via FOIA from Alice Lichtenstein, who served as vice-chair of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in 2015. The large, rigorous clinical trials on saturated fats—on 60,000 to 80,000 people worldwide—could never demonstrate that reducing saturated fat lowered a person’s risk of death from heart disease or any other cause.
[nearly two dozen review papers by teams of scientists worldwide have reached similar conclusions: saturated fats do not affect cardiovascular or total mortality. These are the most reliable health outcomes derived from the most rigorous data—clinical trials.
The latest of these published only weeks ago in the Annals of Internal Medicine, concluded that restricting saturated fats could not be shown to benefit people without established heart disease—the very population covered by the Dietary Guidelines.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-02229?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Even an outside expert review commissioned by HHS—anticipated to be published alongside the guidelines on Thursday—concludes that saturated fats do not affect mortality. This review does not support a continuation of the 10% cap. The evidence for dropping it is strong. It simply didn’t matter."
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I guess the French Paradox isn’t so much of a paradox then! 
The guidance to reduce saturated fat is about 80 years old, and based on some pretty faulty “research.” To me, and the voices I mostly follow, it’s clear that the real problem is a diet that is high in both saturated fat and sugar/simple carbs - in other words, the standard American Diet.
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So you’re an advocate for the previous guidelines? I don’t agree with RFK Jr. on some of his vaccine positions (although his personal opinions appear more controversial than his policy positions) but I think he actually got it right on this one.
multiplying by 3?? holy crap, i was always honest - can only imagine the horror my physicians must have felt reading my pre-appt surveys
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Yeah you’d be shocked at what patients tell you. I had patients that were clearly drunk during their appointment who said they don’t touch the stuff.
I think some of the variance here could easily be ascribed to “what is your level of tolerance”.
If zero tolerance for negative impact is the agenda, then no one ahould drink any alcohol. There’s definitely negative effects with drinking alcohol.
But there’s also a carcinogenic aspect to taking a walk in any urban area. And with zero tolerance almost nothing in our lives would be acceptable except things we haven’t studied enough yet, like the effect of microplastics on the human body.
Unfortunately, that leads to almost any useful guidelines operating in shades of grey.
And honestly, my opinion might be biased but I absolutely feel that the previous “any amount causes cancer” carried a very hypocritical aspect to it and was also an agenda. Alcohol is much easier to pick on than say, the plastics industry. So we received multiple promotions on the health dangers of alcohol and almost none on exhaust emissions from fossil fuels, decreased quality of foods served in schools, or the effects of micro-plastics in the human body (though we do at least know they are there now).
A landmark “independent” report from 2000 on the carcinogenic effects of glyphosate indicating that Round Up was not likely to cause cancer was just retracted by the journel that published it because it turns out that Monsanto had a fairly heavy influence on the study.
Science is very imperfect, still a benefit (IMO) but my faith in “unbiased” is at an all time low. And certainly doesn’t begin with the new guidelines.
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I think studies being funded by industry is something we’re going to see a lot more of, and really just have to accept. Certainly you should disclose whether the study is being funded by industry or if you as a researcher are a paid consultant for companies, etc, but as researchers we certainly can’t be expecting to get a lot of money from the NIH at this point so realistically one of the largest sources of money to do research is from industry.
As a researcher, I make it very clear to sponsors that I’m going to publish the results of whatever research we do, whether it’s positive or negative to the sponsor’s product, and the companies I work with have never had a problem with that. There certainly may be discussions about methodology or whatever, but in general, I’ve never had an issue, and indeed have published studies demonstrating no benefit to products from large pharmaceutical companies.
There are obviously researchers that have had negative associations with industry in the past but I think it would be wrong to say that industry sponsored research is inherently flawed. There are just as many conflicts of interest with publicly funded research.
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This change came at the same time there was a move to reduce guidance for males from at most two to at most one drink per day.
May say as much about official government guidance as it does about alcohol.
-Al