Skip to content
Sign in

Food, drink and alcohol: what the leaflets and the NHS say

A woman with curly hair jogs through a city park in a grey zip top, wearing wireless earbuds

Food, drink and alcohol: what the leaflets and the NHS say

  • Explainers
  • The Dose Club team
  • Updated

The Wegovy and Mounjaro leaflets say the injection can be given with or without meals and say nothing about drinking alcohol. The NHS medicine pages do. What each source says, quoted.

Questions about meals and alcohol come up in the community rooms every week. The answers below are quotations from the UK leaflets, the summaries of product characteristics (SmPCs) and the NHS medicine pages, with the source named each time. Nothing here is a recommendation. The documents speak for themselves, and your prescriber or pharmacist answers what they leave open.

Meals

The Wegovy SmPC says: "Wegovy is administered once weekly at any time of the day, with or without meals." The leaflet says the same in plainer words: the injection can be given at any time of the day regardless of meals.

The Mounjaro leaflet says: "You can use your pen at any time of the day, with or without meals." The Mounjaro SmPC says: "The dose can be administered at any time of day, with or without meals."

So neither medicine's timing is tied to eating. Both leaflets add that the medicine should be used on the same day each week where possible, and the weekly schedule article on this site covers that.

What the documents say about eating

The Wegovy leaflet describes the medicine as one that "should be used with a reduced calorie meal plan and increased physical activity", and section 1 explains how it works: it "works by acting on receptors in the brain that control your appetite, causing you to feel fuller and less hungry and experience less craving for food". The NHS tirzepatide page says: "You'll need to eat a healthy, balanced diet while taking this medicine."

Neither leaflet lists foods to avoid. Both connect vomiting and diarrhoea with losing fluid, and the side effects article on this site quotes those passages.

Alcohol

The word "alcohol" does not appear in the Wegovy leaflet. It appears in the Mounjaro leaflet only in the list of ingredients: "Mounjaro KwikPen contains benzyl alcohol", an excipient in the solution, with a note that benzyl alcohol may cause allergic reactions. That is a statement about the contents of the pen and has nothing to do with drinking.

The NHS medicine pages do address drinking. The NHS semaglutide page, which covers Wegovy, Ozempic and Rybelsus, says: "It's best not to drink alcohol, because it can increase side effects like feeling or being sick (nausea or vomiting)." The NHS tirzepatide page, which covers Mounjaro, says: "It's best to avoid drinking alcohol while using tirzepatide because it can increase side effects like feeling or being sick (nausea or vomiting)." Both pages were last reviewed in May 2026.

The NHS wording is advice from the NHS and is quoted here as such. The leaflets, which are the regulator approved documents, do not cover drinking, so a question about alcohol with your own medicine and your own health is one for your prescriber or pharmacist.

Other medicines taken by mouth

One passage in the Mounjaro SmPC concerns tablets. Section 4.5 says: "Tirzepatide delays gastric emptying and thereby has the potential to impact the rate of absorption of concomitantly administered oral medicinal products." The leaflet's standing instruction covers this: under "Other medicines and Mounjaro", it asks you to tell your doctor or pharmacist about any other medicines you take. The Wegovy leaflet has the same section, headed "Other medicines and wegovy".

Where this fits in the app

The symptom log in The Dose Club app records nausea and other symptoms with a severity and a note, tagged with the day since the dose. The note is free text, so what you ate or drank can go in it if you want a record for your prescriber. The app never links a symptom to a cause and never comments on alcohol or food.

Sources

This article is information, not medical advice. Talk to your prescriber about your treatment.

  • leaflets
  • food
  • alcohol
  • NHS