The US may be setting new alcohol limits. Here's what it means for you...

Headlines recently blared warnings that “Biden’s alcohol czar” was “telling” Americans to limits their drinking to 2 drinks per week.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: no one is going to limit your alcohol consumption for you in the United States. It was tried once: it’s called Prohibition, and it failed spectacularly.

What DOES exist are guidelines provided by governments around the world about suggested weekly and sometimes daily drinking limits to limit your health risks. These guidelines vary wildly by country: Ireland (perhaps to no one’s surprise) is on the higher end, with 17 drinks per week for men and 11 for women; Canada recently changed its guidelines to just 2 drinks per week, for both men and women.

Those low-risk drinking guidelines are what is up for review in the United States in 2025, and apparently, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism is considering moving from its current guidelines toward Canada’s much lower ones.

Here’s what it means for you:

1. Less is always better: The NIAAA is considering changing its guidelines because of a growing body of research says that no level of alcohol consumption is fully safe. However, even limiting your consumption to the old recommended guidelines (14 per week for men, 7 for women) can meaningfully reduce your long-temr health risks from drinking. What are those? Well…

2. There are serious long-term health risks from drinking: Regular long-term alcohol consumption can not only cause liver damage, but can meaningfully increase your risk of developing many types of cancer, as well as heart disease. If you’ve been drinking heavily for a long time, talk to your doctor about the health impacts. You may be surprised.

If you’re looking to cut back or quit drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an app that provides motivational exercises, an insightful drink tracking system that helps you understand why you drink, and a personalized support group of your peers to help you make needed changes. We’ll help you stick to a weekly limit that reduces your health risks from drinking. Plus, it’s completely anonymous - even we don’t know who our users are, and we will never ask! Start your journey to long-term health today - get the app!

Moderation programs

It’s not as common to hear about people working to moderate their drinking (vs. quit drinking entirely), as many of the more prominent programs that help problem drinkers focus on total abstinence from alcohol.

However, cutting back on drinking is a much more palatable goal for many people, and some may avoid seeking help until it’s too late because they don’t want to go fully sober.

In addition, moderation programs can be especially helpful for people who have not yet developed a dependence on alcohol, but who do drink in a risky manner. There is strong and mounting evidence of their long-term effectiveness (see here for just a few relevant studies).

Even for those who intend to go 100% sober in the future, moderation can be a helpful stepping stone, building the self-confidence and understanding necessary to make more difficult habit changes.

So it might be worth knowing how to pursue a goal of moderate drinking. Let’s look into some options!

There are two well-known formal programs that do a great job helping people stick to moderation goals:

1. Moderation Management: We especially love this program because its founder focused heavily on cognitive behavioral therapy in developing their strategies to help people stick to moderation goals. There are online forums as well as in person meetings, online drink tracking, and resources in the form of handbooks to help you quit or cut back.

2. ModerateDrinking.com: This online, self-directed web app program helps people stick to moderate drinking goals, and has been proven effective in a randomized clinical trial funded by NIH/NIAAA.

Both Moderation Management and Moderate Drinking are included on the SAMHSA National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP), which means they have been shown to be effective for some people to quit or cut back on drinking.

You can use either of these programs in conjunction with Drinker’s Helper, and many of our members use multiple approaches at once to have the best chance of success.

If you’re looking to cut back on drinking, we’d love to help. Drinker’s Helper is an iOS app that provides an anonymous support group of people with similar drinking histories for encouragement and advice, a drink tracker for insight into the triggers that make you want to drink and the reasons you want to change, and a library of over 100 short motivational exercises to help you stick with your moderation or sobriety goals. You can try it out for free for a week before joining.