New alcohol guidelines slash how much we can drink

Tough new safe drinking guidelines have cut the number of alcoholic drinks we can enjoy – just in time for Christmas.

COVID has already put a dampener on Christmas and now Australians are being told they have to drink four fewer alcoholic drinks per week to meet health guidelines.

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has delivered the sobering news in the midst of the party season and just two weeks before Christmas.

Previously safe drinking guidelines allowed up to 14 drinks per week, that will be lowered to just 10 drinks under tough new guidelines issued today.

It means Australians will have to abstain from drinking alcohol on at least one or two days per week.

In addition drinkers must consume less than four glasses of alcohol on any one day if they want to stay healthy.

And, the tough new guidelines also recommend that pregnant women, breast feeding mothers and those under the age of 18 do not drink at all.

Safe drinking guidelines have been lowered to just 10 drinks a week.

The guidelines are the result of a four-year review of the evidence on the harms and benefits of alcohol by a panel of experts and have been endorsed by all the nation’s Chief Medical Officers.

The new rules were issued in draft form last year allowing for 12 months consultation but will be officially adopted without significant change from today.

It’s the first time the rules have been reviewed in over a decade.

“A large volume of scientific literature has come out over that time and more and more evidence is pointing to increased risk of cancer from fairly low levels of drinking,” the chair of the NHMRC alcohol committee Professor Kate Conigrave said.

Every extra alcoholic drink per day increases your risk of breast cancer by 10% and alcohol is also implicated in colon cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, mouth cancer she said.

“Every year there are more than 4000 alcohol-related deaths in Australia, and more than 70,000 hospital admissions. Alcohol is linked to more than 40 medical conditions, including many cancers,” Professor Paul Kelly, Australia’s Acting Chief Medical Officer said.

Drinking within the guidelines means you have less than a 1 in 100 chance of dying from an alcohol-related condition, he said.

The guidelines mean Australian couples who share a bottle of wine each night will exceed the guidelines and drinking more than two cans of full strength beer two cans of pre-mixed spirits each night would mean you exceed the guidelines.

A ‘standard drink’ contains 10 grams of pure alcohol. This is about 285ml of full-strength beer, a can of mid-strength beer, 100ml of wine, or a single 30ml shot of spirits.

Most glasses of wine poured at home or in a restaurant contained just under two standard drinks, and a can of beer or pre-mixed spirits held 1.5 standard drinks Professor Conigrave warned.

Australian National University epidemiologist Professor Emily Banks said there had been huge social change and most Australians were already drinking within the guidelines.

“The SCG in 1975 decided to crack down on drinking and their version of cracking down back then was limiting the number of cans of beer you could bring in to 24 per person per day. That was cracking down!” she said.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data shows the proportion of people drinking at levels that exceeded the lifetime risk has fallen from 21 per cent in 2009 to 16.8 per cent.

The new guidelines are exactly the same as those followed by the French, they are similar to proposed US guidelines but more generous than Holland which says no alcohol at all, or maybe one drink a day, Professor Banks said.

Most glasses of wine poured at home or in a restaurant contained just under two standard drinks.

Britain’s guidelines allow 14 standard drinks per week but their alcohol service sizes are smaller than Australia’s so it works out at 11.2 Australian standard drinks per week, she said.

Professor Conigrave said she was branded the Grinch that stole Christmas when the draft guidelines were issued last year.

“I’d like to stress that this isn’t telling anyone what to do, it’s giving them information so they can choose what they want to do,” she said.

The alcohol industry has branded the new rules a “nanny state” crusade to treat alcohol like smoking.

The industry claims the data used by the NHMRC shows a committed teetotaller who has zero drinks per week faces the same risk of death as a person who has 28 standard drinks per week.

Professor Conigrave dismissed this claim and said many people who didn’t drink had done so in the past or didn’t drink because they had health problems or abused illicit drugs so the comparison was not clean.

Professor Banks said the evidence review had also considered studies showing potential benefits from alcohol consumption and “if we’d excluded those studies the guidelines would have allowed fewer than 3 drinks per week,” she said.