6 Alcohol Guidelines To Follow, According To Experts

Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images The guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say women should not have more than one alcoholic drink daily and men should not have more than two. “Those specific guidelines also point out that it doesn’t mean seven drinks in a week for women, it means one drink a day — so not drinking for five days and then drinking six drinks on the sixth day is not the same thing.” “Alcohol is a lot for your body to process,” which is why you can’t just bank all of those drinks for day six, Byrne said. Beyond being a carcinogen, alcohol is a toxin, according to Byrne, who added that “our body prioritizes metabolizing the alcohol because it’s a toxin, so it wants to get rid of it.” The WHO guidelines say that even one drink per day for women and two per day for men is still associated with these health risks, Brooks noted. “Because there are actually so many ways that we can achieve those benefits that people think they’re getting from drinking, we can get all of those things without drinking,” Brooks said. “If somebody believes that having that drink at the end of the day is their way to relax, then just by default they’re not thinking about other ways that they actually could decompress,” Brooks said.