Dry January, the campaign promoted by the charity Alcohol Concern, encourages people to cut alcohol completely during the first month of the year. Although many highlight the health benefits that this challenge brings, Ian Hamilton, lecturer at the Department of Health Science at York University, has raised a couple of points against this approach.
He wrote on the British Medical Journal commenting on how this campaign has an unclear target demographic, and that it is likely to be put in practice by people that are not at high risk of developing alcohol-related health problems. Besides that, he explained that “Dry January risks sending out a binary, all or nothing, message about alcohol – that is, either participate by abstaining or carry on as you are.”
This would mean that, after succesfully completing the dry month, people would go back to their unhealthy drinking habits, with the feeling that it is ok because they’ve “had a month off”.
Hamilton’s opinion has been criticized by other academics who point out that cutting alcohol for a month actually does bring health benefits (such as saving money, sleeping better and loosing weight) and that people who find it too hard to abstain for 31 days might have something to think about in relation to their alcohol consumption.