I’m not quite sure why people keep trying to “improve” beer by adding vitamins to it, trying to make it akin to the sort of health drinks one might find at a health food store. Beer is plenty healthy already and it certainly feels like brewers have pretty much perfected how to make it by now. If there’s a more perfected beverage, I can’t imagine what it might be.

It’s fairly well settled that when you drink, you lose B vitamins. Alcohol robs your body of those vitamin compounds. My personal regime after a night of drinking is to take a B complex vitamin pill along with two or three Advils before retiring (which has been nearly a perfect preemptive remedy for me).

A Philippine inventor, Virgilio “Billy” L. Malang, has come with yet another beer that adds vitamin B back into the beer. He recently presented his beer at the First International Inventors Day Convention held February 2 in Thailand. Malang’s beer also nabbed a gold medal at the Genius-Europe competition in 2004 out of 1,000 inventions submitted by 540 would-be inventors from forty-six different nations.

Malang apparently began homebrewing while living in the U.S. in the 1980s. He uses organic rice syrup as his wort, using no grains at all, which he believes gives his beer a distinctive taste. There’s also one more secret ingredient, which still has a patent pending, that he uses as a substitute for hops. This substitute he says is “sourced locally” so that suggests a plant that grows in the Philippines. At this point, it’s sounding less and less like an actual beer, since it uses only half the traditional ingredients: yeast and water.

Other related inventions by Malang include “a ‘tagay cup’ good for three drinkers—with three handles and three cup lips assigned to each member of a drinking trio, and an anti-hangover capsule derived from ‘activated’ coco shell charcoal.” For more on Malang and his inventions, there’s a story in the Philippine Inquirer.

I guess what I don’t quite understand is how simply adding vitamins to a beer at some point during the brewing process guarantees that it can be absorbed by the body when you drink the finished product. I mean, it my still be in there, but how do we know that the body can take it from the solution and add it to the body’s total amount, thus replenishing whatever B vitamins have been lost in the same process. Otherwise, it really doesn’t do much good, does it? And it seems like an awful lot of effort when simply keeping a bottle of vitamin pills on the nightstand would do the same job.

As I wrote about last month, there’s a new Reunion beer but I don’t remember noticing it will be a rye beer. After trying Bear Republic’s wonderful new all-rye beer, I’ve taken a renewed interest in the alternative grain in beer. It will make it’s debut at the Celebrator’s 20th Anniversary Party this Sunday. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, there’s still time to order online. Join me for a/the Reunion.

From the press release:

Calling it a beer for hope and in honor of the passing of a long time friend, SBS Imports will once again offer its specially crafted Reunion Beer. Reunion Beer is the inspiration and collaboration of Alan Shapiro, president of SBS Imports, Pete Slosberg, creator of Pete’s Wicked Ale™, and Virginia MacLean, long time friend and colleague, as a way to raise awareness of and donations for the Institute of Myeloma and Bone Cancer Research. All met during the early days of Pete’s Brewing Company. Virginia passed away from the disease last June, four months after the initial release of Reunion.

“Reunion ‘08 celebrates the life and cause of our departed friend,” said Alan. “Virginia wanted to continue the mission of bringing hope to others with the Reunion project.” All proceeds are donated to IMBCR. “To date almost $100,000 has been raised by the Reunion team’s creative approach,” said Dr. James R. Berenson, CEO and President, Medical and Scientific Director at IBMCR. “We are eternally grateful to everyone supporting the beer and their efforts to bring this disease to the attention of the public,” added Geoffrey M. Gee, IMBCR’s Executive Director. The beer will be unveiled at the Celebrator Beer News’ 20th anniversary (Mardi Gras) party at the Oakland Convention Center on February 17.

Reunion Beer

Last year’s version was an Organic Imperial Brown Ale based on one of Pete’s popular brews. This year’s style, Organic Red Rye Ale, combines another popular Pete’s style ‐ Wicked Red with rye and caraway. Pete not only lent his name and likeness to this philanthropic and heartfelt effort, he worked closely with Bison Organic Brewery to craft the Reunion recipe. Visit Bison Brewing for more information.

Where to Buy

Reunion ‘08 will be available starting mid‐February at leading specialty beer retailers. For those living in states where there is no retail availability, it may be possible to purchase Reunion via mail order from selected retail partners, pending individual state laws. Reunion ‘08 will also be available in kegs. Retail availability and distribution, and a list of partner pubs and restaurants featuring Reunion ‘08 on draft, will be available at the Reunion website.

Pete Slosberg, who’s currently in Argentina, sent me an e-mail with some additional history of this beer:

Just so you know, [Reunion]’s origin was about 15 years ago when we developed Pete’s MultiGrain Beer. We started out doing a rye beer and then expanding it. Along the way, I asked Pat Couteaux, our brewmaster to try, for fun, a test batch of a “liquid rye bread beer” and it was great, but we didn’t go with it. It tasted like I was back in a NYC deli.

The back story on this beer for Reunion is that whenever Alan came to visit Virginia in the Bay Area, they would go to Max’s Opera Cafe for deli food. I mentioned to Alan that our old formula would be a fitting memory to their friendship so I contacted Pat and he got the old formula to Dan at Bison.

Thanks, Pete.

The second annual release of Reunion — A Beer for Hope will take place during the week of February 17, 2008. This year’s beer celebrates the life of Virginia MacLean, the inspiration and one of the founding partners of the Reunion beer collaboration. (See links page at Reunion Beer for stories on the 2007 release.)

This year’s beer is an Organic Red Rye Ale, once again brewed in cooperation with Bison Brewing in Chico, CA. It is a reddish-amber colored beer, with a pronounced malt forward profile balanced by the delicate spices of the hops and rye. It is 6.5% alcohol by volume. The beer will be distributed through the SBS-Imports distributor network, to approximately 20 states, suggested retail price of $4.99-$5.99 per 22 ounce bottle. Consumers may also mail order (starting mid-February) via the Michael Jackson Rare Beer Club. 100% of the profits generated by SBS-Imports will benefit the Institute for Myeloma & Bone Cancer Research (IMBCR). Donations to IMBCR accepted via Reunion Beer or directly at the IMBCR site. Bottle and label art available upon request. Full press release to follow in early February. If you missed this story last year, here’s how it started. Once upon a time, Pete Slosberg created Pete’s Wicked Ale. And the brown ale was good. He had help spreading the word, of course, and in the early days Alan Shapiro and Virginia MacLean also helped Pete’s become a nationally known microbrewery. Pete, of course, moved on to chocolate and Alan Shapiro worked for a time with Merchant Du Vin and now heads his own import company, SBS Imports. Virginia MacLean, in the meantime, left the beer business but as she approached her fortieth birthday was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, which is a type of bone cancer that currently has no known cure. For more information about the disease, see the MMRF or the Institute for Myeloma & Bone Cancer Research. Last February, Pete Slosberg and Alan Shapiro got together and decided to help their friend by creating a new beer to help raise awareness and money to fund research into this disease. The beer was named “Reunion,” and it was a big, imperial brown ale and was the first commercial beer Slosberg had done since selling Pete’s Wicked Ale to Gambrinus in 1998. He worked with award-winning brewer Daniel Del Grande at Bison Brewing in creating the organic beer. Unfortunately, last June Virginia McLean passed away in her home in Mountain View, California. But Pete and Alan decided to continue the fight against the disease that took their friend in her name and in her honor. When you start seeing this beer again this February, please buy a bottle or two to support this worthy cause.

About Multiple Myeloma & IMBCR:

Multiple Myeloma is a unique cancer of plasma cells that attacks and destroys bone. The term is derived from the multiple areas of bone marrow that are usually affected by the disease. Worldwide, over 1,000 people a day are diagnosed with this currently incurable form of bone cancer. Led by Dr. James Berenson, IMBCR is one of the world’s leading research organizations combating this disease. IMBCR specializes in developing novel chemotherapy drugs and treatments. For further information on multiple myeloma or IMBCR, please visit www.imbcr.org or contact 310-623-1210.

A UPI story originating from Germany is indicating that a new German study found that xanthohumol, which is in hops, is good at fighting cancer. Specifcially, xanthohumol “inhibits a family of enzymes that can trigger the cancer process, as well as help the body detoxify carcinogens.” It appears that this new study confirms the results of a study at Oregon State University, which I covered last year. Research indicates xanthohumol has more and stronger antioxidants then vitamin E and it may even help in the fight against bad cholesterol.

“It’s very healthy. I think the ingredients in the beer are very good,” Werner Back of Brewing Technology at the Technical University of Munich.

The average beer doesn’t contain enough xanthohumol to make drinking beer an effective method for fighting cancer, though there are German beers with higher levels of xanthohumol. Though perhaps hop research could be directed toward increasing the amount of xanthohumol in hop varieties?
 

First a little good news to ring in the new year. According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, a thirst for alcohol may indeed be hardwired in our DNA. And perhaps more importantly, unlike some other mammals, we appear to be predisposed to drink it in moderation, in direct contradiction with claims of neo-prohibitionist propaganda. According to an article by Natalie Angier in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune (via the New York Times News Service), “[t]he holidays are a time of multicreedal spirituality and festivities, and alcohol has been a fixture of celebration and religious ritual since humans first learned to play and pray.”

From the Tribune article:

“As far back as we can look, humans have had a love affair with fermented beverages,” said Patrick McGovern, an archeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania. “And it’s not just humans. From fruit flies to elephants, if you give them a source of alcohol and sugar, they love it.”

McGovern and other archeologists have unearthed extensive evidence of the antiquity and ubiquity of alcoholic beverages. One of the oldest known recipes, inscribed on a Sumerian clay tablet that dates to nearly 4,000 years, is for beer. Chemical traces inside 9,000-year-old pottery from northern China indicate that the citizens of Jiahu made a wine from rice, grapes, hawthorn and honey.

Humans may have an added reason to be drawn to alcohol. Throughout antiquity, available water was likely to be polluted with cholera and other dangerous microbes, and the tavern may well have been the safest watering hole in town. Not only is alcohol a mild antiseptic, but the process of brewing alcoholic beverages often requires that the liquid be boiled or subjected to similarly sterilizing treatments. “It’s possible that people who drank fermented beverages tended to live longer and reproduce more” than did their teetotaling peers, McGovern said, “which may partly explain why people have a proclivity to drink alcohol.”

What I find most interesting about this is that for much of mankind’s history, because of poor sanitation, drinking alcoholic beverages was safer than water, which led to such labels as “liquid bread” for beer. Without understanding why, people discovered that they were better off with booze than bacteria. But even after drinking water became safe as our understanding of the world increased, people still enjoyed a pint from time to time. Of course, there’s the social lubricant aspect that remains prevalent today, which still may be an aid to reproduction. But as for promoting health, hardly a month goes by without another new claim that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol has a previously undiscovered health benefit. I find it reasonable and altogether ironic that these two reasons for or benefits from drinking, which have literally been around since the dawn of civilization, are not only still with us but are largely unchanged since we crawled out of the muck and first stood erect. As if the lessons of prohibition weren’t obvious enough, we are a species who drinks. And no amount of proselytizing or preaching can change that. To which I can only reply, cheers to that!

I came across this list at Forbes when I was reading the original Forbes story about the world’s heaviest-drinking countries. This is their list of the Top Ten Hangover Cures, which I’ve reprinted below.

1. Water (Lots of It)
2. Sports Drinks
3. Over-the-Counter Pain Relievers
4. Vitamins B6 and B12
5. Berocca
6. Prickly Pear
7. Tripe Soup
8. Haejangguk (Korean for “soup for the stomach”)
9. Rosiglitazone (used by diabetics to boost glucose levels)
10. Hair of the Dog

In the beginning of the article, however, they begin with this annoying chestnut. “The best—and most painfully obvious—remedy is not to drink yourself into oblivion.” Can it be possible nobody realized that abstinence cannot be a cure since if you never get a hangover there’s nothing to remedy? I know I’m splitting hairs here but I’ve always found the “just say no” mentality a bit overly self-righteous. Nothing ventured, nothing gained I always say. Keep abstaining and you gain no wisdom, no experience, no nothing that you need to grow as a person.

The first four and the last one are old tried and true ones, but five through nine were largely new to me. I wrote a book in the early 1990s that included an appendix of common hangover cures, which I researched pretty thoroughly at the time. When you drink, your body — primarily the liver — begins processing the alcohol. Once it starts working, there’s really nothing you can do to speed things up. All you can do it wait. Alcohol also dehydrates you making you feel dry because when you drink you lose more water than your body replaces until your liver and kidneys finish their work. While the excess alcohol is waiting to be processed, it is stored in your cells, displacing the water that is normally there: this phenomenon is known as “extra-cellular” and it’s what makes you feel dry and crave water. When you drink faster than your liver’s ability to process the alcohol, it gets backed up. That backup is what causes your misery. The medical record I looked at suggested that there is only one thing that will cure a hangover: time. You may be able to ease some of your symptoms, but there’s nothing to any of the supposed cures that will do anything to speed up your recovery. That doesn’t stop anybody from trying, of course, as people — myself included — will do anything in the hopes of eliminating the pain of a hangover.

In my own experience, I’ve found preventative measures are always more effective than anything you can try the morning after. When I put together my appendix, I divided the various methods to keep yourself feeling fit into four categories based on when to administer them.
 

1. Before Drinking
2. During Drinking
3. Before Going To Bed
4. The Morning After

Naturally, there are exponentially more supposed cures for the morning after than for anytime the night before. I think that’s because the preventative measures involve common sense and a few basic ideas, things that most of us forget to do once we start drinking. My personal regime is to take a vitamin B supplement and two Advil (I used to take Tylenol until I read that it can be hard on your liver) before going to bed. I’ve had a pretty good success rate with that, which is why I still use it. I’ve started reprinting my hangover cure appendix so you can take a look at it. I only have up the first three categories, and a few from the morning after, but little by little I’ll get it all up there.

I’m not sure how old this is, because it’s not dated, but at least more than two years ago PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) created a spoof ad aimed at young adults based on the famous and highly successful “got milk?” PSA campaign that the California Milk Processor Board created in 1993.

It was called “Got Beer?” and was a “tongue-in-cheek advisory to college kids that milk is so bad, nutritionally speaking, that even beer is better for you!” Unsurprisingly, MADD showed how being a teetotaler robs one of the ability to laugh and enjoy life. They were reportedly “mad, despite the fact that [they] made it clear that [PETA] only used beer for comparison purposes because no one thinks of beer as a health food; as a substitute for cow’s milk, health experts recommend soy milk, juice, or even water.”

PETA has set up a companion website, Milk Sucks, which explains the controversy in great detail. Their point, of course — apparently lost on the neo-prohibitionist crowd — was that milk is not as good for you as conventional wisdom would have us believe and that even beer, which many people don’t think of as being a health drink, contains more nutritional value than milk. PETA concludes:

“The scientific evidence is conclusive: Beer in moderation is good for you, while even one glass of milk supports animal abuse and harms your health,” says PETA’s Director of Vegan Outreach Bruce Friedrich. “You can drink beer responsibly, but the same can’t be said of milk.”

And they have a fair amount of evidence to back up their claim, including the table below which compares the nutritional value of beer and milk. But even a suggestion that beer may be a healthy beverage must strike the average neo-prohibitionist as supporting or advocating its consumption. And we can’t have that. If beer is considered healthy — which it is, of course — then that might give people the idea that it’s okay to drink it. I certainly like envisioning the “Got Beer?” PSAs with celebrities sporting a foam mustache. Now that would be funny.

As reported in England’s Telegraph, a new Spanish study has concluded that the best thing you can drink after playing vigorous sports is not Gatorade, but beer. Specifically, the study found that for the dehydrated person, beer helps retain liquid better than water. Wow, finally a good reason to work out.

I happened upon this item from across the pond at Zythophile, who appears to be a soul mate when it comes to disliking neo-prohibitionists and their attendant propaganda. The UK’s Times Online made a rather startling, if not altogether surprising, revelation that the Department of Health in Great Britain, in defining what it means to be a “hazardous drinker” in 1987 did so by essentially just making it up and pulling the numbers out of thin air. I’ll let that sink in. As the Times’ article puts it, the “guidelines have no basis in science. Rather, in the words of a member of the committee that drew them up, they were simply ‘plucked out of the air’.” The twenty year-old standards by the Royal College of Physicians set “safe limits” at 21 units of alcohol a week for a man and 14 for a woman, apparently without regard to weight so far as I can tell. Britain defines one unit of alcohol as “8 grams of pure ethanol.”

In the article, a doctor involved in creating the standard, reminisces:

Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the college’s working party on alcohol, told The Times yesterday that the figures were not based on any clear evidence. He remembers “rather vividly” what happened when the discussion came round to whether the group should recommend safe limits for men and women.

“David Barker was the epidemiologist on the committee and his line was that ‘We don’t really have any decent data whatsoever. It’s impossible to say what’s safe and what isn’t’.

“And other people said, ‘Well, that’s not much use. If somebody comes to see you and says ‘What can I safely drink?’, you can’t say ‘Well, we’ve no evidence. Come back in 20 years and we’ll let you know’. So the feeling was that we ought to come up with something. So those limits were really plucked out of the air. They weren’t really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee.”

Well how scientific. And I’d think all well and good if it were just a guideline, some advice to tell a patient. But, of course, that’s not how the government used these numbers. They instead not only endorsed the numbers — and indeed why shouldn’t they having come from a supposedly reputable health organization — they essentially set them in stone, terrorizing citizens with them the same way America’s health bureaucracy does likewise by defining binge drinking at a ridiculous “five or more drinks in a row.”

Not only that, but they continued to cling to the numbers as gospel, despite numerous subsequent studies that contradicted those numbers. For example, here are the results of a 2000 study by the World Health Organization:

The WHO’s International Guide for Monitoring Alcohol Consumption and Related Harm set out drinking ranges that qualified people as being at low, medium or high-risk of chronic alcohol-related harm. For men, less than 35 weekly units was low-risk, 36-52.5 was medium-risk and above 53 was high-risk. Women were low-risk below 17.5 units, medium between 18 and 35 and high above 36.

Government bureaucracy has a habit of becoming entrenched even in the face of contrary evidence. At least one blogger I respect sees this as no big deal, that everyone simply knew the numbers were made up. Perhaps I wouldn’t be so bothered by that if I didn’t strongly believe my own government, in collusion with Big Pharma and much of the guilt-ridden medical community, has been lying — and continues to lie — to my face about my own son Porter’s autism. I think it’s a mistake to take lying so cavalierly, especially when it comes from an area of society that we’re conditioned to place great trust in: the medical community. The Hippocratic Oath was undoubtedly a good start, but the more I learn about the way doctors, their protectionist professional groups, along with medical insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospital administrators and the like manipulate patients and society at large for their own purposes, the more that oath seems hypocritical and largely an anachronism in our modern world that medical science seems quick to ignore whenever it doesn’t suit them.

I think it’s precisely because people tend to trust doctors and so-called medical science that they often can’t conceive of it being used as propaganda or to support an extreme agenda. And that’s why I find this sort of lying so dangerous. We may take for granted that our government will lie to us or that people trying to persuade us of something might do likewise, but I don’t see how that makes it acceptable or something we shouldn’t get worked up about. Have we really all been lied to so much that we no longer recognize it? That it becomes acceptable if it’s for our own good? I can see how telling a fib to a child to keep him or her safe as a temporary solution has some merit, but if we don’t fess up when they get older, that’s an entirely different matter. Though personally, I think nowadays we overprotect children and go too far in trying to keep them from experiencing any adversity. As a result, they are incapable of dealing with even the smallest slight as young adults. This also makes it easier for our own government to continue becoming more and more paternalistic as each successive generation becomes increasingly comfortable with being told what to think and within what narrow range is acceptable. We’re all adults and yet more and more governments treat their citizens like children to be taken care of instead of allowing everyone to have a real say in decisions made on our behalf. That’s a classic example of a slippery slope. If you accept one lie because you believe it’s for your own good, then it becomes easier for you to accept the next one, and the next one after that, etcetera. I find this whole subject fascinating, and if you want to read more about it, I recommend Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, by Sissela Bok, and The Liar’s Tale, A History of Falsehood, by Jeremy Campbell.

As usual, I’ve veered off on a tangent, so let’s hear from another British doctor who also conveniently believes that the specific limits are superfluous.

Christopher Record, a liver-disease specialist at Newcastle University, suggested that “it doesn’t really matter what the limits are”. “What we do know is, the more you drink, the greater the risk. The trouble is that we all have different genes. Some people can drink considerably more than [the limits] and they won’t get into any trouble.”

Well that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. That means using a standard that doesn’t work is useless and counter-productive for predicting how a person will react to a given amount of alcohol. And if government continually uses false statistics to manage its population, it does them great harm, both psychologically and possibly physically. It would be one thing if for the last twenty years health officials told people that drinking too much had dire consequences and advocated that people take care in that regard. That would be quite sensible and without question in the public interest. But that’s not what the health agencies did. Instead, they made up a number and told people not to drink more than this amount or there would be dire health consequences, knowing full well that the the levels they set had no basis in science whatsoever.

I’m confident that our own definition of binge drinking had a similarly unscientific genesis and I know how that definition has been used to skew statistics toward a specific agenda by neo-prohibitionists. I would be shocked to learn that our British cousins never did likewise. When you officially and purposely set what it means to be a heavy drinker at a level you know to be too low, you can claim with a straight face that there are many more alcoholics plaguing society than there really are. Armed with these false statistics, committed anti-alcohol organizations can do a lot of harm to society.

I’m not entirely sure why governments tend to embrace neo-prohibitionist agendas, but Zythophile’s hypothesis bears examining.

My personal guess is that too many politicians — and members of public health committees — are in the game because they want to control others, and they associate drinking with loss of control, and therefore want to stop it: except they know, after the failure of prohibition in the United States, that stopping people drinking is impossible, and so they try to make us feel as guilty as possible about one of life’s best pleasures.

But whether they meant well or were being maliciously manipulative, this sort of lying by those entrusted with the public health is pretty hard to swallow.

Greenpeace today released the results of an independent analysis of rice at an Arkansas mill which supplies rice to Anheuser-Busch for use in their beer. The lab found genetically engineered rice in 75% of the samples. From the press release:

An independent laboratory, commissioned by Greenpeace, detected the presence of GE rice (Bayer LL601) in three out of four samples taken at the mill. The experimental GE rice is one of three rice varieties that were first found in 2006 to have contaminated rice stocks in the US. Since then, GE contamination has been found in approximately 30 per cent of US rice stocks. This has had a massive negative impact on the US rice industry as foreign markets, where GE rice has not been approved, have been closed to US rice.

“Anheuser-Busch must make a clear statement about the level of GE contamination of the rice used to brew Budweiser in the US and spell out what measures are in place to ensure this beer does not reach the company’s export markets,” said Doreen Stabinsky, Greenpeace International GE Campaigner.

“US beer drinkers need Anheuser-Busch to explain why it is not preventing use of this genetically-engineered rice in the US. If, as the company has informed Greenpeace, all of the Budweiser exported from the US or manufactured outside of the US is guaranteed GE free then Anheuser-Busch needs to state this publicly, and explain the double standard,” said Stabinsky.

Greenpeace informed Anheuser-Busch of the test results prior to their release and sought clear information from the company on the extent of contamination and its global policy on the use of GE ingredients. Anheuser-Busch responded that the rice is approved in the US and is not used in brewing Budweiser destined for export. The full extent of the contamination remains unclear, however.

LL601 GE rice was retroactively granted approval by the US Dept of Agriculture in an effort to reduce public concern and company liability despite 15,000 public objections. The European Food Safety Authority stated that there was insufficient data to make a finding of safety. Greenpeace says that US consumers have a right to know if this GE rice is used to make Budweiser. This GE rice is not approved outside the US so the Budweiser brewed with it could not be sold abroad.

Anheuser-Busch is the largest single rice buyer in the US, buying 6-10 per cent of the annual US rice crop. Budweiser is one of only a few beers having rice as an ingredient. The brand is found in around 60 countries through a mix of exports and local brewing arrangements.

I recently did an article on green breweries and interviewed the Senior Group Director of Environmental, Health and Safety for A-B. I was pleasantly surprised at just how many things they were doing to be “green” so it seems surprising that they’d overlook genetically engineered rice being used in the beer itself. One thing you can say about Anheuser-Busch is that they do care about their public perception, so it will be interesting to see their reaction to this revelation.

Doug Muhleman, Anheuser-Busch’s Group Vice President of Brewing, Operations and Technology, released a statement yesterday which I think suggests that Greenpeace is not the virtuous one in this story. On closer examination, this may be more about international politics than beer. Here’s Muhleman’s statement:

Greenpeace’s statements regarding our beer brands are false and defamatory. All of our products are made according to the highest quality standards and in complete compliance with the laws in each country where we sell our beers.

We stand in support of U.S. farmers, who are partners with us in the quality of our products. Greenpeace recently asked us to join their advocacy campaign on genetically modified crops. We refused their calls to boycott U.S. farmers, and they are now retaliating.

The use of genetically modified crops in the United States is not new. The vast majority of the commercial corn and soybean supply in the United States contains genetically modified versions that are certified to be safe for human consumption by the U.S. Government.

We use U.S. rice for brewing our products for U.S. consumption. U.S.-grown long-grained rice that may have micro levels of Liberty Link proteins present is fully approved by the U.S. Government, having determined that it is perfectly safe for human consumption. Moreover, the Liberty Link protein, like all proteins, is substantially removed or destroyed by the brewing process. Liberty Link has not been found in any of our tests of our beers brewed in the United States.

We fully comply with all international regulatory standards on the use or presence of genetically modified ingredients wherever our beers are sold internationally, as well. Neither Anheuser-Busch, nor our international licensed brewing partners use genetically modified ingredients, including genetically modified rice, in brewing products sold in any country with legal restrictions.

We talked with Greenpeace, hoping to help them understand the facts. We are disappointed that they instead chose to pursue pressure tactics.

Now I’m no fan of GMO’s, but they have been used here for many years and, like it or not, they’re a part of our massive food system. Short of pulling out every crop in the country and starting over, I’m not exactly sure what would satisfy Greenpeace. Certainly the way Greenpeace is seeking to sensationalize this seems more bullying than anything. I confess I was alarmed when I first read the story but having looked at it more closely in the interim I’m not sure their tactics are entirely warranted.

Me with Doug Muhleman at an A-B reception at GABF last year.
 

CNN’s Health section has an interesting little item called Letting Kids Drink Early Reduces Binging in which Stanton Peele, psychologist and author of “Addiction-Proof Your Child,” suggests that educating your children about drinking by introducing it in the home is a timeworn tradition that will reduce binge drinking later in life.

From the article:

He says many of the programs set up to stop alcohol abuse contribute to the teen binge-drinking crisis. Any program that tells kids flatly not to drink creates temptation, he says. “Preparing your child to drink at home lessens the likelihood that they are going to binge drink,” he says. “Not sharing alcohol with your child is a risk factor for binge drinking.”

Missing the point, of course, Drug Free America Foundation director Calvina Fay equated Peele’s philosophy with “giving permission to your children to do harmful things.” (Though why Fay’s commenting at all is a mystery since her foundation has almost nothing to do with alcohol.) At any rate, cultures around the world have been teaching their children about drinking in the home for centuries without harming their offspring. I’d certainly be curious to know why she thinks that teaching your kids to drink responsibly could in any way be “harmful?” But I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, most of these groups seem to take an all or nothing approach. They don’t see degrees. They see alcohol (and drugs) as all bad, not just bad in excess or if consumed irresponsibly. It almost seems like a failure of imagination. If you think all drinking is bad, then it would be impossible to understand how teaching your progeny moderate and responsible drinking for enjoyment would be valuable to them when as young adults they are faced with peer pressure and have to make their own decisions. And as Peele suggests — and I think he’s quite correct — the neo-prohibitionist’s absolutist policy of no education and just saying no is making the problem of underage and binge drinking far worse than it needs to be. There’s an old adage, “a little education goes a long way” but I guess in the mind of the neo-prohibitionist that doesn’t include alcohol education. Until it does, it’s hard to swallow that they really care at all about curbing underage drinking or stopping binging.

While reading over the text of the latest study showing a decreased risk of kidney cancer for moderate beer drinkers, I noticed in the References a couple of older studies that showed that beer and/or alcohol had both specific and general health benefits. Most of the 37 academic papers listed as references were about renal cell cancer (a.k.a. kidney cancer), but these two, both from 2000, were about other health benefits of beer consumption.

The first, Beer increases plasma antioxidant capacity in humans, was published in the February 2000 issue of the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. Here is the PubMed abstract:

The positive association of a moderate intake of alcoholic beverages with a low risk for cardiovascular disease, in addition to ethanol itself, may be linked to their polyphenol content. This article describes the effect of acute ingestion of beer, dealcoholized beer, and ethanol (4.5% v/v) on the total plasma antioxidant status of subjects, and the change in the high performance liquid chromatography profile of some selected phenolic acids (caffeic, sinapic, syringic, and vanillic acids) in 14 healthy humans. Plasma was collected at various times: before (T0), 1 hour after (T1), and 2 hours after (T2) drinking. The study is part of a larger research planned to identify both the impact of brewing on minor components potentially present in beer and their metabolic fate in humans. Beer was able to induce a significant (P < 0.05) increase in plasma antioxidant capacity at T1 (mean +/- SD: T0 1,353 +/- 320 microM; T1 1,578 +/- 282 microM), returning close to basal values at T2. All phenolic acids measured in plasma tended to increase after beer intake (20% at T1, 40% at T2). Syringic and sinapic acid reached statistical significance (P < 0.05 by one-way analysis of variance-Fisher's test) at T1 and T2, respectively. Plasma metabolic parameters (glucose, total cholesterol, triglycerides, and uric acid) and plasma antioxidants (alpha-tocopherol and glutathione) remained unchanged. Ethanol removal impaired the absorption of phenolic acids, which did not change over the time of the experiment, accounting for the low (and not statistically significant) increase in plasma antioxidant capacity after dealcoholized beer drinking. Ethanol alone did not affect plasma antioxidant capacity or any of the antioxidant and metabolic parameters measured.

The second one, Nutritional and Health Benefits of Beer, was published in the November 2000 issue of The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. Here is the PubMed abstract:

Physicians should be aware of the growing evidence supporting the nutritional and health benefits of moderate consumption of alcohol as part of a healthy lifestyle. The recently approved voluntary label on wine (”the proud people who made this wine encourage you to consult your family doctor about the health effects of wine consumption”) implies that physicians should promote wine as the preferred source of dietary alcohol. However, studies evaluating the relative benefits of wine versus beer versus spirits suggest that moderate consumption of any alcoholic beverage is associated with lower rates of cardiovascular disease. From a nutritional standpoint, beer contains more protein and B vitamins than wine. The antioxidant content of beer is equivalent to that of wine, but the specific antioxidants are different because the barley and hops used in the production of beer contain flavonoids different from those in the grapes used in the production of wine. The benefits of moderate alcohol consumption have not been generally endorsed by physicians for fear that heavy consumers may consider any message as a permissive license to drink in excess. Discussions with patients regarding alcohol consumption should be made in the context of a general medical examination. There is no evidence to support endorsement of one type of alcoholic beverage over another. The physician should define moderate drinking (1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men) for the patient and should review consumption patterns associated with high risk.

Interesting stuff and not terribly surprising given that recent years have seen a growing body of such findings. What’s perhaps more curious is how silent the neo-prohibitionist groups are about all of the health benefits of moderate consumption. It’s getting harder and harder for them to maintain their shrill evils of alcohol position in light of these generally unbiased scientific findings. What’s perhaps more troubling is that their very inflexibility, especially their refusal to entertain lowering the drinking age or allow reasonable alcohol education, are actually causing the problems associated with immoderate drinking to increase. By forcing kids to drink underground, without benefit of parental or adult supervision or example, today’s generation seems far less equipped to learn moderation.

Take for example, the neo-prohibitionist position undertaken by government studies that defines binge drinking as five drinks in one session. If physicians in many other studies suggest that two drinks per days is considered to be the definition of moderate drinking, then the distance between healthy drinker to problem drinker seems fantastically small. That makes one or both standards all but meaningless. But since it would be hard to argue that the standard of two drinks per day is too high then it seems to me a prima facie conclusion that it’s the binge drinking standard that is out of whack.

But these groups with government collusion continue to demonize alcohol and refuse, where possible, to allow parents to teach their children about how to drink, with the predictable result that newly freed college students binge at the first opportunity. As former Middlebury College president John M. McCardell Jr. — and the founder of Choose Responsibility — asks, has making the drinking age 21 stopped kids from drinking? The answer is quite obviously “no,” which suggests that this approach does not work as intended. And with the growing body of health benefits associated with moderate drinking, aren’t these prohibitions simply doing more harm than good? I think an argument can be made that by not allowing alcohol education and making alcohol a forbidden taboo, neo-prohibitionist groups are actually causing more binge drinking and keeping young people from realizing the health benefits of moderation.