On Friday, US surgeon general Vivek Murthy proposed a major change on how America labels alcoholic beverages: booze should come with cigarette-style warnings, because alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer, according to labeling Ireland will be released later this year. This has intensified the focus on alcohol ahead of a scheduled update to the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans later this year, but it's unclear whether to expect new labels—adding them would require action from Congress.
Drinkers, however, are already taking their own action. If the bars seem a little empty this month, it may be because more people are trading happy hour for Dry January. The tradition, where people abstain from alcohol for an entire month, is growing in popularity.
According to data from polling organization CivicScience, one in four US adults completed Dry January in 2024, up from 16 percent last year. And an estimate 15.5 million people in the UK, where the movement originated 12 years ago, said they planned to participate this year, according to Alcohol Change UK, the charity behind the movement. In 2013, that number was just 4,000. Temporary sobriety is contagious, and study show that pushing the bottle for a month has immediate health benefits. But whether the health benefits will last—or reach those most in need—remains unclear.
“This concept, that it's a one-month detox or spring clean that prepares you for the rest of the year, I don't think there's any evidence for that,” said Gautam Mehta, an associate professor of hepatology at University College London studied the effects of a month of abstinence. “But people seem to be gaining a greater understanding of their own relationship with alcohol and what they want to do with their drinking relationship for the rest of the year.”
A 2018 study Mehta followed a group of moderate drinkers who became sober for a month and compared them to a control group who maintained their old habits. The most notable benefits for non-drinkers include better sleep and weight loss. They also experienced milder side effects; their blood pressure fell and their biomarkers for insulin resistance, an indicator of reduced risk for developing diabetes, improved.
And some people say that a sober month helps them feel less overwhelmed. In 2019, University of Sussex researchers examined a survey filled with several thousand people. They found that 59 percent of respondents reported drinking less in the six months following Dry January, and 32 percent said they were in better physical health. However, only about 38 percent of people who started the survey followed up at the six-month mark.
However, just taking a short break does not necessarily give the body time to fully recover from the effects of drinking. That's what two British doctors, who are identical twins, showed when they did it themselves experiment in 2015. (Mehta provided expertise on the experiment, which aired as an episode of the BBC's Horizon.) Each spent a month sober, and tests showed they had equally healthy livers. They then spent a month drinking 21 units of alcohol a week, the recommended limit for men in the UK at the time (this has since been changed to 14 units). There was a difference in how they did the job: One drank three units (about a large glass of wine) every day for a month, and the other only drank once a week, but bined the all 21 units. By the end of the month, they both had increased inflammation of the liver. For the binging twin, it was clear that even taking six days between binges was not enough time for the organ to fully heal.
