If you don't want to face the unpalatable truth about your boozing, the alcohol lobby is on your side

Outdated alcohol guidelines put New Zealand out of step with modern research, but our health authorities are in no hurry to update them

In Canada, proposed guidelines for low-risk drinking set the weekly limit at two drinks.

Here in New Zealand, the recommendation is to cap alcohol at 10 drinks weekly for women, and 15 for men, with two alcohol-free days per week.

Despite these guidelines being nearly 15 years old, and documents from Health NZ showing that they consider a review of the guidelines to be 'necessary', for now, the guidelines are staying as they are.

"The complication is that the Ministry of Health has come in over the top of [Health NZ] and has said 'actually these are our guidelines ... we want to control this and we're putting a pause on that work'," says RNZ's Guyon Espiner.

"It certainly does show that they're listening to the alcohol industry, who are pretty exercised about this - because as you can imagine, this could have a significant effect on sales if people did take this advice and did drink significantly less."

In a series of articles over the past few months, Espiner has reported on issues of alcohol harm and how the alcohol lobby has impacted policy in New Zealand…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details