MW 4 reasons Americans aren't drinking as much alcohol this holiday season - or any at all
By Jaimy Lee
The increasing number of people on GLP-1s is one factor behind the trend
Fewer people in the U.S. are drinking alcohol these days.
The holidays have long been a season to overindulge, whether that means too many glasses of wine or too many cookies. But this year may be different.
Fewer people in the U.S. are drinking alcohol, and when they do imbibe, they drink less than they used to. There's no single reason alcohol use has declined in recent years, but a mix of medical, social and economic factors are at play, like drinking habits that began to evolve in the 1990s and growing use of GLP-1 medications that can limit a person's interest in having a cocktail.
"GLP-1 receptor agonists are decreasing people's drinking," said Alex DiFeliceantonio, interim co-director of Virginia Tech's Center for Health Behaviors Research. "But I do think some of these other factors, like cost or people becoming more health conscious and maybe realizing that alcohol might not be very good for them, are probably also playing a role."
The percentage of people in the U.S. who consume alcohol is at an all-time low, with only 54% of Americans saying they drink, according to a Gallup poll. Back in 2019, the percentage was far higher - at that time, 65% of Americans who participated in the same poll said they drank. In this year's poll, the groups with the biggest drops in self-reported drinking habits include white people, Republicans, women, and people younger than 54.
Here are four reasons some people in the U.S. are altering their drinking habits.
1. GLP-1s dampen the desire to drink
About 12% of Americans say they are taking a GLP-1 drug, the game-changing medication used to treat conditions like obesity, sleep apnea and Type 2 diabetes. The way Eli Lilly's $(LLY)$ Zepbound and Novo Nordisk's (NVO) Wegovy work is by signaling a feeling of fullness to the brain, which helps people lose weight. There are now signs that something similar happens with alcohol.
As millions of people turned to the medications to lose weight, physicians and researchers started to hear that the lack of desire to overeat extended to drinking. A group of researchers at Virginia Tech ran a small study of 20 adults with obesity to see how GLP-1s affected the way they felt about drinking and how drunk they felt.
"We found people who are taking the GLP-1 receptor agonists were drinking less and had less binge-drinking days," said DiFeliceantonio. She also noted that the participants reported a "lower craving score for alcohol."
Read: Weight-loss drugs may reduce opioid and alcohol abuse by up to 50%, study finds
Much of the available research focuses on whether GLP-1s reduce drinking in people with alcohol-use disorder as compared with social drinkers, but that information can also help explain why people who are taking GLP-1s want to drink less (even if they don't intend to cut back).
"For people who drink socially, you can just really think of it like food," said Wajahat Mehal, professor of digestive diseases at the Yale School of Medicine. "They're snacking less, and a glass of wine three or four times a week is kind of like a snack."
2. Some Americans are getting healthier
The science is still out about the health benefits of a glass (or two) of wine a day, but it's long been known that heavy or binge drinking is bad for your health.
In the 1990s, researchers began to notice that risky behaviors in teens were declining, according to Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist and professor of health policy at Stanford University. There were fewer pregnancies, fewer crimes and less drinking among those younger than 18. At the same time, families were smaller, with fewer children to monitor, and new forms of entertainment like the internet and videogaming were increasingly popular. Teens had other ways to spend their time than going to parties.
"You go through this period of about 30 years of a huge number of people getting through their teen years without a lot of exposure," Humphreys said. "That will lower the really heavy drinking rates in the population."
Dig deeper: Is any amount of alcohol safe to drink, in light of surgeon general's cancer warning?
The social drinkers who came of age in the 1990s are now approaching 40 or are well into midlife, and many of them have drinking habits that are very different from their parents'. They may look down at "mommy wine culture" and instead aspire to get a great sleep score.
They also have more information about the harms of alcohol. We know that drinking increases the risk of at least seven types of cancer, including breast, esophageal and colorectal - even for people who consume alcohol only socially.
The number of alcohol-related deaths is also higher than it used to be. About 178,000 people in the U.S., mostly middle-aged or older, now die each year from drinking. That's up from 138,000 deaths in 2016-17, indicating a widening divide between those with alcohol-use disorder and social drinkers.
Even the data on drinking a moderate amount of wine and its purported health benefits are mixed. The "French paradox," first presented in the 1980s, referred to the idea that small amounts of wine are good for the heart, based on the fact that the French drink wine, eat butter and other saturated fats and live longer than most British people. But critics later said the French healthspan may have more to do with factors like walking regularly and eating smaller portions.
There is still an active ongoing debate in medical circles about whether wine has a health benefit. Earlier this year, physicians criticized a study published in the American Heart Association's medical journal Circulation that found light drinking may lower the risk of coronary events, whereas researchers in Spain expressed concern over a different study that said all drinking is unhealthy.
"Blanket messages may oversimplify complex evidence," they wrote.
3. People may choose cannabis over alcohol
Walk into a legal cannabis store, and alongside the vapes and edibles, you'll find cans of cannabis cocktails.
There is some data showing that more consumers are trading hangovers for being "California sober" - forgoing hard drugs and alcohol while partaking in marijuana. Alcohol sales are down, while hemp-derived drinks have rapidly become a $1 billion business, according to J.P. Morgan analysts.
"It is too early to draw a definitive conclusion, but it does seem that moderation in alcoholic beverage consumption could be at least somewhat impacted by consumers shifting to other mood-altering alternatives," J.P. Morgan's Drew Levine told investors in November.
Read: Legal cannabis may be boosted by alcohol warning from surgeon general
For people who use both substances, cannabis may stem overdrinking, according to a study published in November in the American Journal of Psychiatry. (Other studies have found it can increase drinking.)
Brown University researchers had 138 people at least twice visit a "bar" they built in a lab on the Providence campus. The participants then smoked a cannabis cigarette or a placebo cigarette before being asked if they wanted a drink. The participants who smoked the cigarettes with the two highest levels of THC drank 19% and 27% less alcohol, respectively, than the other participants.
"People are increasingly turning to cannabis as opposed to alcohol," said Jane Metrik, the study's lead author and a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown.
Part of the thinking behind the study was to better understand how cannabis affects alcohol consumption. "The signal to the general public is that it's a better choice," she added, "but that's not necessarily the case."
4. Gen Z is doing things differently
Gen Z's approach to alcohol is vastly different from that of previous generations. Members of this generation, who were born between 1997 and 2012, prefer non- or low-alcohol drinks. They also spend less money on alcohol than millennials or Gen X members did at the same age, raising questions about whether the price of drinking is prohibitive or if it's a temporary change given the inflationary environment in which Gen Z is growing up.
"Gen Z is a little bit different in terms of headwinds," Lawson Whiting, CEO of Brown-Forman $(BF.B)$, which sells the whiskey brand Jack Daniel's, told investors in June. "They just don't have the money in their pockets to be able to do things."
Stanford's Humphreys downplayed that idea, however, saying alcohol is much cheaper now than it used to be, citing federal excise taxes on alcohol that have been flat (and not a percentage of the retail price) since the 1990s.
A different take: Is booze making a comeback?
For people who want to go out and enjoy a non-alcoholic drink, there is now a range of options beyond soda or water, including custom mocktails or rapidly growing non-alcoholic brands like Athletic Brewing and Seedlip.
Sixty percent of Gen Z members who are at least 21 years old say they are interested in non- or low-alcohol drinks, and 61% prefer non-alcoholic drinks when spending time with friends, according to a survey conducted by Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP), which took a minority stake in Athletic Brewing in 2022.
-Jaimy Lee
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December 23, 2025 12:08 ET (17:08 GMT)
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