Washington: a small majority of Americans now believe that even moderate alcohol consumption is harmful to health, which is a reflection of the growing concern about public health and a continuous decrease in national drinking percentages, according to a new Gallup survey.
The poll shows that only 54% of Americans report alcohol occasionally or regularly in 2025 – the lowest level that was registered since Gallup started following the metric in 1939, just a few years after the end of the ban.
Between 1997 and 2023, at least 60% of the respondents consistently identified as drinkers, making the current figure a remarkable decrease. The shift comes in the midst of increasing awareness about the health risks related to alcohol, even in moderate quantities.
Those who said they drank alcohol reported that it was in smaller quantities, with the average number of drinks that was used in the past week 2.8, “the lowest figure that Gallup has registered since 1996,” said the pollster on her website.
The attitude towards alcohol, which Gallup has been following since 2001, saw the most important difference in the poll that was published this week.
The number of people who considers alcohol consumption – a maximum of one or two drinks per day – if bad for personal health rose to 53% in 2025. For comparison, the figure was 27% in the early 2000s.
“The drinking habits of Americans are shifting in the midst of the revaluation of the medical world of the health effects of alcohol,” the Pollster noted.
In January, the then surgeon-general Vivek Murthy called for alcohol to be sold with a cancer warning label on the package.
“Alcohol is an established, to be prevented cause of cancer, responsible for around 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 deaths by cancer per year in the United States,” he said in a statement.
“Yet the majority of Americans are not aware of this risk,” he added, which underlined the urgent need for public education.
