What, exactly, is ‘moderate drinking’?

What the research suggests and how to think about it. That depends on whom you ask, and what country you live in. Over the past several years, there has been a rise in alcohol-related deaths and a steady wave of news about the health risks of drinking.

Calls for people to drink only in moderation have become more urgent. But what, exactly, does that mean? “Tongue in cheek, people have defined it as not drinking more than your doctor,” said Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. More officially, in the United States , moderate drinking is defined as one drink or less per day for women and two drinks or less per day for men.

But other countries define moderate drinking, also called low-risk drinking, differently, and recent research around alcohol’s health harms has raised questions about current guidelines..