Watch out beer lovers, President Joe Biden’s alcohol czar may be coming for you. George Koob, Biden’s czar and Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), admires Canada’s alcohol guidelines and could soon be telling Americans to have no more than two beers per week.
Currently American guidelines recommend two drinks per day for men and only one for women. Canada, however, recommends only having two drinks per week. American recommendations are up for review in 2025. Koob told the Daily Mail he was watching the Canadian “big experiment” with interest.
“If there’s health benefits, I think people will start to re-evaluate where we’re at,” Koob said. Although he admitted to partaking in a couple of glasses of “buttery Californian Chardonnay” he said there are “no benefits” to physical health from drinking alcohol and that he was “pretty sure” American alcohol consumption recommendations are “not going to go up.”
“So, if [alcohol consumption guidelines] go in any direction, it would be toward Canada,” Koob said. “Most of the benefits people attribute to alcohol, we feel they really have more to do with what someone’s eating rather than what they’re drinking,” he added.
“So it really has to do with the Mediterranean diet, socio-economic status, that makes you able to afford that kind of diet and make your own fresh food and so forth. With this in mind, most of the benefits kind of disappear on the health side.”
Amanda Berger, Distilled Spirits Council vice president of science and health criticized Koob’s comments in a statement to Fox News Digital: “Dr. Koob’s comments calling for a drastic change to the federal recommendations on alcohol before the review of alcohol research has even begun undermines the scientific rigor and objectivity of the entire Dietary Guidelines process.”
“For more than 30 years, the federal guidance on alcohol consumption has been no more than one drink per day for women and two drinks per day for men for those who choose to drink,” she continued. “It is extremely alarming and inappropriate for a federal official to predetermine the outcome of the Dietary Guidelines and suggest changing decades of precedent without the benefit of the scientific review to support such a sweeping move.”