Two drinks per week, dry January: Canada's new recommendation for alcohol consumption

Canada has updated its alcohol consumption guidancefor the year 2023 and according to the new guidelines, it should be Dry January in the country as it is the only risk-free approach. According to the government-backed guidance, if you want to drink at all, then two drinks maximum each week aredeemed to be low-risk.

The latest advice is a steep drop from the previous recommendation of 2011 which allowed a maximum of 10 drinks a week for women and 15 drinks for men.

Apart from reducing the levels of alcohol consumption to zero, the new guidelines by Health Canada also suggest mandatory warning labels for all alcoholic beverages.

"The main message from this new guidance is that any amount of alcohol is not good for your health,"said Erin Hobin, a senior scientist with Public Health Ontario and a member of the expert panel that developed the guidelines. "And if you drink, less is better."

The nearly 90-page report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) details a number of health risks involved with previously thought-to-be-low alcohol consumption.

According to CCSA, any more than two standard drinks — the equivalent of a 12-ounce (341ml; 0.6 pints) serving of 5 per centalcohol beer or a five-ounce (142ml; 0.26 pints) glass of 12 per centalcohol wine,causes an increase in negative outcomes, including breast and colon cancer.

This new finding may be a shocker for adult Canadians as around80 per cent of adults in the country like to drink.

"The new guidance is maybe a bit shocking,"Dr Hobin said. "I think it's very new information for the public that at three standard drinks per week, the risk for head and neck cancers increases by 15%, and further increases with every additional drink."

"Three standard drinks per week to most Canadians wouldn't be considered a large amount of alcohol,"she added.

Canadians are calling these changes in the guidelines as "drastic"; from nearly two drinks per day to two per week.Though health experts argue that this is the result of much better and deeper research over time."The data across the board is improving in terms of how and what we're measuring,"said Jacob Shelley, a professor of health and law at Western University.

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