Straight Talk About Alcohol Warning Labels
I woke up to the NY Times headline on Friday, January 3, 2025: Breaking news: Surgeon general calls for cancer warnings on alcohol. This headline generated a lot of messages and conversations with my family, clients and colleagues.
It’s happening! Maybe… While it is exciting to see the conversation reaching the level of Surgeon General, we must also recognize the very powerful alcohol lobby that will likely resist any label changes. Initial reactions from the alcohol industry include: “Warning labels won’t be an immediate death blow to alcohol makers, but it will compound the long-term threats to the industry,” Blake Droesch, an alcohol industry analyst, told Reuters.
It’s been nearly four decades since Congress approved the first government warning label on alcohol, the one that says pregnant women shouldn’t drink and warns about the dangers of driving while drinking. No updates have been made since then. Any effort to add a cancer warning label to alcohol would face significant push-back from a well-funded and powerful beverage industry, which spends nearly $30 million every year lobbying Congress.
In this episode of The Sober Edge Podcast, I share more about the New York Times article, including:
- The proposed changes
- The science to back it up
- The call to action
- Where we stand compared to other countries with alcohol regulations and labels
It will most likely take a long time for the outcry to result in changes in the labeling legislation. For cigarettes, it was 20 years after the first alarm bells were sounded before full labels warning of cancer were mandated. The good news is that this push may impact the guidelines about ‘safe’ drinking amounts, which are due to be reevaluated this year.
In the meantime, we can continue to spread the word about the risks of consuming even light amounts of alcohol and we can continue to ask for healthier alternatives!
Cheers to that!
