On Friday, the US general surgeon Vivek Murthy suggested a major change on how the United States labels alcoholic beverages: Alcohol should come with warnings similar to those on cigarettes, given that alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer, similar to the label Ireland will be released later this year. This has intensified attention on alcohol ahead of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ scheduled update later this year, but it’s unclear whether new labels should be expected; Adding them would require congressional action.
Drinkers, however, are already taking their own measures. If bars seem a little emptier this month, it may be because more people are swapping happy hour for Dry January. The tradition of abstaining from alcohol throughout the month is gaining popularity.
According to data from the polling organization CivicScience, one in four American adults completed dry January in 2024, up from 16 percent the previous year. and an estimate 15.5 million People in the United Kingdom, 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 only 4,000. Temporary sobriety is contagious and studies show that giving up the bottle for a month has immediate health benefits. But it’s not yet clear whether the health benefits last or reach those who need them most.
“This concept that a month-long detox or cleanse sets you up for the rest of the year, I don’t think there’s any evidence for that,” says Gautam Mehta, associate professor of hepatology at University College London. who has studied the effects of a month of sobriety. “But people seem to have a better understanding of their own relationship with alcohol and what they want to do with their relationship with drinking for the rest of the year.”
A 2018 study Mehta followed a group of moderate drinkers who remained sober for a month and compared them to a control group who maintained their old habits. The most notable benefits for non-drinkers included better sleep and weight loss. They also experienced more subtle effects; their blood pressure decreased and their insulin resistance biomarkers improved, an indicator of a lower risk of developing diabetes.
And some people say that a month of sobriety helps them reduce their overall drinking. In 2019, researchers at the University of Sussex analyzed a survey completed by several thousand people. They found that 59 percent of respondents reported drinking less six months after Dry January, and 32 percent said they were in better physical health. However, only about 38 percent of people who started the survey continued at six months.
Still, taking just a short break doesn’t necessarily give the body time to fully recover from the effects of the drink. That’s what two British doctors, who are also identical twins, demonstrated when they performed their own experiment in 2015. (Mehta contributed his expertise to the experiment, which aired as an episode of the BBC program Horizon.) They each spent a month sober and tests showed they had identical healthy livers. They then spent a month drinking 21 units of alcohol per week, the recommended limit for men in the UK at the time (it has since been revised downwards 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 drank only once a week, but drank all 21 units. At the end of the month, both had increased liver inflammation. For the binge-eating twin, it was clear that even taking six days of rest between binges was not enough time for the organ to fully heal.