Moderate Wine Consumption Is Healthier Than Not Drinking...Contradicting the WHO
The World Health Organization Can't be Trusted
There is a brand of bureaucratic dishonesty being practiced and foisted upon as many people as will listen. This charade is playing out on a global stage as the World Health Organization (WHO) and its collection of neo-prohibitionist echo chambers disseminate a particular dogma: that there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption.
And yet we know this is not true. And so does the WHO. In fact, just last week we saw the announcement of a study of 340,000 people that found moderate wine drinkers are less likely to die than non-drinkers.
Will the WHO now revise its claims about alcohol? Not while they are captured by prohibitionists and continue to disseminate misinformation about drinking.
On January 4, 2023, the WHO officially declared that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health,” effectively attempting to rewrite centuries of cultural history as well as science with a single press release. This wasn’t just a health warning; it was a shot across the bow of the global wine trade. The impact of this declaration was immediate. By late 2023, we saw Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health pivot from advocating moderate consumption levels to a near-zero recommendation.
In early 2025, the Surgeon General of the United States issued a Report that mimicked the WHO declaration that there was no safe level of Alcohol consumption. More importantly, the Surgeon General declared wine causes cancer and called for warning labels on alcohol, saying so.
The media, too—unable to resist a salacious headline—ran with the claim about “No Safe Level” of alcohol consumption and went on to repeat the Surgeon General’s claim that alcohol causes cancer.
Today, the WHO’s claims are ubiquitous. Where previously any Internet search on alcohol consumption noted that moderate consumption of no more than 2 drinks a day for men and 1 drink a day for women was best practice, now we read everywhere that alcohol causes harm from the first sip and that cancer will follow.
The Problem is that these claims about alcohol consumption and the cancer risk from drinking are misleading…and intentionally so. All you have to do is look at the data that the WHO looks at.