Vox reports:

Most Americans still don’t know that alcohol can cause cancer — and the alcohol industry is working hard to make sure it stays that way.

For the past three years, the industry, aided by its allies in Congress and later the Trump administration, has sought to discredit and eventually bury a major analysis that offers new evidence of the link between drinking alcohol and getting sick and dying from various causes, including cancer.

It appears their campaign has succeeded. Three co-authors on the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, which was commissioned in early 2022 by the US Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden, told Vox that they were informed last month that the Trump administration did not intend to publish the final draft of the study or its findings.

“The thing that the alcohol industry fears more than increased taxes is increased knowledge about the risks associated with drinking alcohol, particularly around cancer,” Mike Marshall, CEO of a group dedicated to reducing alcohol’s harms called the Alcohol Policy Alliance, who was not involved with the study, told me. “Like the tobacco industry, like the opioid industry, they are working hard to prevent the American people from gaining the knowledge that they need to make the best decisions for themselves.”

Why assert so much pressure? It makes sense if you look at the headwinds the alcohol industry faces. Americans today are drinking less. This year, Gallup recorded a historic low in the percentage of US adults who drink: 54 percent, down from 67 percent in 2022.

Though the vibes around alcohol are shifting, a lot of people still don’t fully understand alcohol’s health consequences. Surveys have found that while the percentage of Americans who know that alcohol is a carcinogen has been rising, it is still below 50 percent.

By the end of the year, the federal government will issue new dietary guidelines — something that happens every five years — which include recommended limits on alcohol consumption. The alcohol study’s results were intended to inform those guidelines.

“I was hopeful. … Look at all this evidence we have,” Priscilla Martinez, deputy scientific director of the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute and one of the co-authors, told me in an interview. “This is when the change is going to happen.”

But after the authors submitted their final report to Trump’s health department in March and never saw it again, Reuters reported in June, citing anonymous sources, that the new dietary guidelines would eliminate any specific recommended limits on alcohol consumption. [Continue reading…]