Pontiac Times

U.S. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI-9), a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, has written a second letter to the Dept. of Health and Human Services asking again for it to cooperate with the committee's oversight in the development of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans regarding alcohol consumption. 

The latest push by McClain comes following the committee's seventh attempt in five months to obtain "documents, communications, and staff-level briefings related to the formulation of the Dietary Guidelines" from HHS, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), according to a press release. 

To date, HHS has only provided two provisions of documents totaling 20 pages, the most recent of which was not productive, according to McClain. 

“The Committee has been patient, but after five months, HHS is failing to meaningfully cooperate with the Committee’s oversight,” said McClain in a Sept. 5 letter on behalf of the Committee, alongside Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY-1).

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 along with the National Nutrition Monitoring Act require that Dietary Guidelines are are created using scientific evidence, yet "Despite this statutory mandate for NASEM to complete a review of alcohol related to the Dietary Guidelines, HHS appears to have taken improper authority over the development of alcohol consumption guidelines," according to the committee. 

McClain concluded that if HHS “continues to withhold documents and communications on this matter, the Committee will consider other means, including compulsory process.”

The HHS’s current guidelines for alcohol consumption are one or fewer drinks per day for women, and two or fewer drinks per day for men.

The implications of the Dietary Guidelines could be far reaching for the alcohol industry. 

In 2019, The World Health Organization (WHO) led an initiative called A World Free from Alcohol-Related Harms (SAFER), which aimed to reduce the harmful use of alcohol by 10% by 2025. WHO released a statement in January of 2023 saying there was “no safe amount that does not affect health” in regards to alcohol consumption.

A pair of San Francisco-based attorneys suggested that WHO's findings concerning alcohol consumption may one day set up litigation similar to that which the tobacco industry faced decades ago, according to a blogpost authored by Jessica M. Brown and Ana Dragojevic on behalf of their firm Holland & Knight titled, “Alcohol Consumption Guidelines: A Warning Shot for the Industry.”  

A June 2024 study from WHO announced that between 2010 and 2019, there was a 20% decrease worldwide in alcohol related deaths.

A recent study by Wine American reported that Michigan is home to 196 wine producers who work on 1,448 acres of vineyards. The state’s industry supported 46,769 total jobs in 2022. The winery industry also generated $6.33 billion in the same year.

“It is also the seventh largest wine producing state in the nation, with Northwest Lower Michigan growing 60% of grapes needed,” Sherri Fenton, managing owner of Black Star Farms in Suttons Bay wrote in an op-ed in the Detroit News.