At a brewers’ conference this spring, an alcohol lobbyist fired a warning shot in what has become a multimillion-dollar global battle. Public-health officials “want to tell you that alcohol causes cancer,” Sarah Longwell, managing director of the American Beverage Institute, told the crowd. The industry, she said, was in danger of losing its “health halo.”
For decades, beer, wine and liquor producers have been helped by a notion, enshrined in a number of governments’ dietary advice, that a little alcohol can provide modest coronary and other health benefits.
Rapidly, that advice is shifting as health-policy officials around the world scrutinize their previous advice in the light of research pointing to possible cancer risks.
There is no safe level of drinking.
- U.K. Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies
The change is pressuring the alcohol industry in some of its biggest markets, including the U.S., the U.K. and Russia. Its response is as expensive and sprawling as the threat it perceives, including attacking anti-alcohol advocates’ research and working with governments to formulate policy. Alcohol companies are also funding their own research, including a plan by four companies to contribute tens of millions dollars toward the cost of a rigorous study.
Said Beer Institute President Jim McGreevy, addressing executives at an April conference about the alcohol critics: “We can’t let them gain traction.”
In January, the U.K. weakened 20-year-old advice saying moderate drinking could benefit the heart, calling that benefit less than previously thought. It issued new guidelines saying alcohol raises the risk of certain cancers.
“There is no safe level of drinking,” U.K. Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies told a British television interviewer.
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Also in January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services scrapped the part of its guidelines that said light drinking could lower the risk of heart disease for some people. Asked why, an HHS spokeswoman said more review was needed “to better understand health outcomes that may or may not be associated with moderate alcohol consumption.”
Meanwhile, South Korea, citing possible cancer risks, this year joined Australia in tightening maximum recommended alcohol consumption. A few years earlier, Russia restricted alcohol sales and raised beer and vodka taxes following a World Health Organization study describing various dangers it said drinking posed to health, such as leading to more accidents and infections. (Countries differ in what they consider moderate or light drinking.)
The threat to the alcohol industry isn’t as sharp as that faced by tobacco, which shrank due to rapidly changing public attitudes and government policy after it was determined that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
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Nonetheless, governments’ alcohol advice matters, even if few would-be bar patrons ever consult it. It filters into policy on liquor taxes, retail sales hours and advertising restrictions. More subtly, it can inform public attitudes toward drinking. Brewer Anheuser-Busch now includes in its corporate risk statement that the WHO seeks to reduce what it calls the harmful use of alcohol by 10%.
Alcohol consumption fell in Australia after its government advised less drinking in 2009, dropping to 9.7 liters a person each year from 10.6. In Maryland, liquor, wine and beer sales all slipped after the state raised alcohol taxes in 2011. Alcohol sales in Russia tumbled more than 20% over several years when the government moved against drinking after the WHO report.
The near-consensus the industry enjoyed until recently — that light drinking can actually improve health in some ways — dates back to research four decades ago. A California cardiologist named Arthur Klatsky was trying to figure out what lifestyle factors might affect cardiovascular health. In what he says was a surprise, he discovered that light drinkers had fewer heart attacks than abstainers, as well as a lower statistical risk of dying from coronary heart disease.
It “changed the paradigm for studying the effects of alcohol,” according to the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation, whose precursor organization at times funded Dr. Klatsky.
In 1995, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services revised its alcohol guidance, eliminating the statements that alcohol had “no net health benefit” and that drinking “is not recommended.” Instead, HHS said moderate drinking was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease in some people.
“Science is on our side,” a beer executive told an industry conference the next year. Patti McKeithan of Miller advised convention-goers to start every meeting with legislators by saying that “alcohol can be part of a healthy diet,” according to documents in tobacco-litigation archives, where they can be found because Miller was owned by tobacco company Philip Morris at the time.
Now, newer research is once again shifting the consensus.
One of the first signs came when WHO officials set out nearly a decade ago to develop a new alcohol policy. They planned to focus on “global burden of disease,” assessing a broad range of possible effects, including indirect ones such as rates of accidents and certain infections.