Fewer Americans are reporting that they drink alcohol amid a growing belief that even moderate alcohol consumption is a health risk, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.
The survey finds that 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer — “the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend,” the analytics company says.
And a record high percentage of U.S. adults, 53%, now say moderate drinking is bad for their health, up from 28% in 2015. The uptick in doubt about alcohol’s benefits is largely driven by young adults — the age group that is most likely to believe drinking “one or two drinks a day” can cause health hazards — but older adults are also now increasingly likely to think moderate drinking carries risks.
The findings of the poll, which was conducted in July, indicate that after years of many believing that moderate drinking was harmless — or even beneficial — worries about alcohol consumption are taking hold. According to Gallup’s data, even those who consume alcohol are drinking less.
The federal government is updating new dietary guidelines, including those around alcohol. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, government data showed U.S. alcohol consumption was trending up. But other government surveys have shown a decline in certain types of drinking, particularly among teenagers and young adults.
This comes alongside a new drumbeat of information about alcohol’s risks. While moderate drinking was once thought to have benefits for heart health, health professionals in recent years have pointed to overwhelming evidence that alcohol consumption leads to negative health outcomes and is a leading cause of cancer.
Additionally, there are other factors contributing to the changing perspectives around alcohol, Willa Bennett, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, said on “CBS Mornings Plus” Wednesday.
“We know this generation is increasingly out in the world trying to find real community and camaraderie,” Bennett said. People don’t seem to need alcohol to go out anymore, she said.
Other factors include less stigma around not drinking and the prevalence of social media.
“People do want control of their image,” Bennett said. “People don’t want to give that up. It’s scary. What are the long term risks?”
Growing skepticism about alcohol’s benefits
Younger adults have been quicker than older Americans to accept that drinking is harmful, but older adults are coming around to the same view.
About two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-olds believe moderate drinking is unhealthy, according to the poll, up from about 4 in 10 in 2015. Older adults are less likely to see alcohol as harmful — about half of Americans age 55 or older believe this — but that’s a substantial increase, too. In 2015, only about 2 in 10 adults age 55 or older thought alcohol was bad for their health.
In the past, moderate drinking was thought to have some benefits. That idea came from imperfect studies that largely didn’t include younger people and couldn’t prove cause and effect. Now the scientific consensus has shifted, and several countries recently lowered their alcohol consumption recommendations. Earlier this year, the outgoing U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, recommended a label on bottles of beer, wine and liquor that would clearly outline the link between alcohol consumption and cancer.
“Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States — greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year in the U.S. — yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk,” Murthy said in a statement in January.
The federal government’s current dietary guidelines recommend Americans not drink or, if they do consume alcohol, men should limit themselves to two drinks a day or fewer while women should stick to one or fewer.
Gallup’s director of U.S. social research, Lydia Saad, said shifting health advice throughout older Americans’ lives may be a reason they have been more gradual than young adults to recognize alcohol as harmful.
“Older folks may be a little more hardened in terms of the whiplash that they get with recommendations,” Saad said. “It may take them a little longer to absorb or accept the information. Whereas, for young folks, this is the environment that they’ve grown up in … in many cases, it would be the first thing young adults would have heard as they were coming into adulthood.”
The government is expected to release new guidelines later this year, under the directive of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promised big changes. Kennedy has not hinted at how the alcohol recommendations may shift.
Drinking rates fall to decade low
Slightly more than half of Americans, 54%, report that they drink alcohol — a low in Gallup’s data that is especially pronounced among women and young adults. The previous low was 55%, recorded in 1958.
“Declines in alcohol consumption do not appear to be caused by people shifting to other mood-altering substances — in particular, recreational marijuana, which is now legal in about half of U.S. states,” Gallup said in a news release. “Although marijuana use is higher today than a decade ago, it has been fairly steady over the past four years and thus doesn’t appear to be a factor in people choosing not to drink alcohol.”
Gallup says it has been tracking Americans’ drinking behavior since 1939. Since 2001, it has tracked their views on health implications related to moderate drinking.
Young Americans’ alcohol consumption has been trending downward for years, accelerating the overall decline in alcohol consumption. In sharp contrast with Gallup’s findings two decades ago, when young adults were likeliest to report drinking, young adults’ drinking rate is now slightly below middle-aged and older adults.
Americans’ reported drinking is among the lowest since the question was first asked in 1939. For most of the last few decades, at least 6 in 10 Americans have reported drinking alcoholic beverages, only dipping below that point a few times in the question’s history.
Americans who drink alcohol are consuming less
Even if concerns about health risks aren’t causing some adults to give up alcohol entirely, these worries could be influencing how often they drink.
The survey found that adults who think moderate drinking is bad for one’s health are just as likely as people who don’t share those concerns to report that they drink, but fewer of the people with health worries had consumed alcohol recently.
About half of those who worry moderate drinking is unhealthy said they had a drink in the previous week, compared with about 7 in 10 who did not think drinking was bad for their health.
Overall, only about one-quarter of Americans who drink said they had consumed alcohol in the prior 24 hours, a record low in the survey. Roughly 4 in 10 said that it had been more than a week since they had poured a drink.
