And for the first time since Gallup began asking respondents what they thought about the health effects of moderate drinking, the majority of Americans said they believed that even one to two drinks a day negatively affected a person’s health.
The survey reflects a persistent trend over the past decade: Young people are drinking less.
And it suggests that middle-aged adults — who in recent years have reported drinking more and developed alcohol-related illnesses at higher rates — are starting to cut back.
A decade or two ago, “there was this perception that a glass of red wine with dinner every night might actually help you live longer”, said Dr Scott Hadland, the chief of adolescent and young adult medicine at Mass General for Children and an addiction specialist.
In the 1990s, some doctors even encouraged moderate drinking.
Over the past few years, the health harms of drinking have come into focus.
The number of alcohol-related deaths more than doubled among Americans between 1999 and 2020.
And mounting research suggests that even a little alcohol takes a toll on the body, damaging DNA.
Last year, Dr Vivek Murthy, then the surgeon-general, stressed that drinking caused preventable cancers and called for alcoholic beverages to carry warning labels, like cigarettes.
Gallup’s new data was based on telephone interviews in July with about 1000 adults across the country.
Polls aren’t bulletproof — self-reporting isn’t always reliable, and people often under-report substance use — but the findings generally align with other data showing declining levels of alcohol use over the years, especially among young people, said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University.
The Gallup poll found an especially pronounced drop in drinking among middle-aged respondents.
Just 56% of respondents aged 35 to 54 said they drank alcohol, falling from 70% in 2024.
That “suggests the message is sinking in across the board, not just with young people”, said Johannes Thrul, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The share of adults aged 55 and older who said they consumed alcohol increased slightly from 2024 to 2025, but is still lower than in 2023.
Only 50% of those aged 18 to 34 said they drank alcohol, the same as in 2024 and down from 59% in 2023.
This is consistent with other research suggesting young people are drinking less.
The annual Monitoring the Future survey, a national poll of substance use, has shown a significant decline in young people’s drinking over the past decade, said Megan Patrick, a research professor at the University of Michigan and the Monitoring the Future panel survey’s principal investigator.
Younger people may be skipping alcohol because they grew up with more education around its health harms, Hadland said.
The low levels of youth drinking might also stem from the pandemic, when many adolescents spent formative years stuck at home instead of socialising, Thrul said.
Middle-aged adults, by contrast, drank more during the pandemic.
Thrul said that some young people may be opting for a different substance: cannabis.
The Gallup poll did not attribute declines in drinking to increasing marijuana use. But other studies have shown concurrent rises in cannabis use and decreases in drinking.
Social norms have also shifted among young people, Thrul added.
Movements like “mindful drinking” or going “sober curious” have found a foothold on social media; the non-alcoholic beverage industry has ballooned.
But there isn’t solid data on how cultural trends translate into drinking patterns, Keyes said.
Still, the Gallup poll and other indicators of declining drinking are “certainly a welcome sign for those of us in this area who have been trying to shift the messaging around alcohol use for a long time”, Keyes said.
“It does seem now like it’s taking hold,” she added.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Dani Blum
Photograph by: Ben Rollins
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
