Federal alcohol report being buried

Huffington Post - How many alcoholic drinks do you have in an entire week? Five, seven, 10? More? If you have one drink a day, your health could be impacted - but the powers that be aren’t doing much to make that fact known.

In September, Vox reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services decided not to publish a large federal study on the negative impact alcohol has on our health. A draft of the report, known as the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, was published for public comment in January and is available online.

“This report and our findings were, as we were told, going to inform the new drinking guidelines,” said Priscilla Martinez, the deputy scientific director at the Alcohol Research Group and an author of the report...

Now, instead, a competing report that’s in-line with the country’s current drinking guidelines (one drink or fewer a day for women and two or fewer for men) will inform the guideline update, according to the New York Times. Some of the panelists behind this competing report have financial interests aligned with the alcohol industry, the New York Times reported.

“I think you generally want to have any recommendations about diet or lifestyle behaviors [to be] informed by the most sound science,” Martinez said. “And so that’s what I think is unfortunate about the [the Alcohol Intake and Health Study] not being included.”