A Fermentation Question

January 6, 2010 By Jay Brooks

fermentation
I preordered Michal Pollan’s new book, Food Rules, so it arrived on the day it was published. At 112 sparse pages, it’s really more of a pamphlet but I’ve been enjoying reading it off and on for the last few days. When I reached Rule #33 (of 64) it stopped me in my tracks, and it started me thinking. Here’s the rule:

Rule 33
Eat some foods that have been predigested by bacteria or fungi.
Many traditional cultures swear by the health benefits of fermented foods — foods that have been transformed by live microorganisms, such as yogurt, sauerkraut, soy sauce, kimchi, and sourdough bread.

Pollan goes on to list essential nutrients, vitamins, etc. found in these foods. He ends by mentioning that probiotics are contained in many fermented foods, which studies “suggest improve the function of the digestive and immune systems,” and may combat allergies, too.

So here’s my question. If, as Pollan seems to suggest, that it’s fairly settled that fermented foods have health benefits, doesn’t it then follow that fermented beverages would, too?

In Rule 43 he suggests drinking wine with dinner, while not mentioning beer at all. And the man’s from Berkeley, for chrissakes. He appears to be following the old reservatrol canard in choosing wine over other alcohol, though he admits alcohol of any kind can be beneficial in moderation, something that’s becoming increasingly apparent in study after study.

That slight aside, isn’t fermentation fermentation? It’s an anaerobic process (meaning it takes place without oxygen) in which chemical reactions split complex organic compounds into more simple substances. And if it’s good in food, it should be similarly beneficial in beer, wine and spirits, too.

Beer has been called liquid bread since ancient times. It’s nourished men and women since civilization began, and increasingly is believed to have been the very reason for civilization’s beginnings. Some scientists now believe that our ancestor’s tolerance for alcohol in quantity was an important factor in their survival. So much so, that quite literally you and I owe our very existence to the fact that we have an unbroken chain of ancestors stretching back to the dawn of civilization whose ability to process alcohol insured they lived long enough to reproduce. If that had not been the case, I wouldn’t be here to write these words and you wouldn’t be here, reading them now.

Anyway, just some … ahem … food for thought. Any brewers, chemists or scientists out there know if there would be any substantial difference between fermented food and a fermented beverage? I certainly can’t think of any. If not, I would suggest that Food Rule #33 be amended to “Eat some foods or drink some beverages that have been predigested by bacteria or fungi.”

food-rules

UK Neo-Prob’s Go Nuts … Again

January 3, 2010 By Jay Brooks

There’s a great post today by Pete Brown concerning more nonsense from Great Britain’s neo-prohibitionist-leaning government flacks. Yet again confirming, at least to me, his status as a kindred spirit regarding this issue, Pete begins with this understandably anger-fueled assessment of the situation. This story comes at the beginning of the year, when people are stopping to take stock of their lives, but instead “the neo-prohibitionists go completely fucking apeshit, pouncing on the moment when many moderate drinkers prove they don’t have a drink problem by taking a few weeks off the sauce, and use it to ram fear and alarm down the nations throats as never before.”

Effectively, the tortured math from the UK’s National Health Service suggests that one-and-a-half pints of lager constitutes “hazardous behavior,” even if that amount is consumed over a week’s time! Congratulations to England, they’ve finally beaten us in being completely ridiculous about drinking guidelines. Read Pete’s post, it’s brilliant stuff.

When All Else Fails, Blame Society

December 30, 2009 By Jay Brooks

crime-dog
Here’s another troubling development in the drive to erase alcohol from society. A study to be published next March in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research was featured in Science Daily last week based on an early view of the study online. (Thanks to Bulletin reader Pete M. for sending this to me.) That account was titled Alcohol Outlets Lead to Specific Problems Among Youth and Young Adults suggesting the issue is settled but the study’s title is a more vague: Ecological Associations of Alcohol Outlets With Underage and Young Adult Injuries. The Science Daily account is based on the study, but being unwilling to shell out the necessary doubloons for a subscription so I can read the whole thing means only the abstract is available to me, and it’s one of the least useful ones I’ve ever read, having almost no real information about the study at all. Here it is in its entirety.

Objective: This paper argues that associations between rates of 3 specific problems related to alcohol (i.e., accidents, traffic crashes, and assaults) should be differentially related to densities of alcohol outlets among underage youth and young adults based upon age-related patterns of alcohol outlet use.
Methods: Zip code-level population models assessed local and distal effects of alcohol outlets upon rates of hospital discharges for these outcomes.
Results: Densities of off-premise alcohol outlets were significantly related to injuries from accidents, assaults, and traffic crashes for both underage youth and young adults. Densities of bars were associated with more assaults and densities of restaurants were associated with more traffic crash injuries for young adults.
Conclusions: The distribution of alcohol-related injuries relative to alcohol outlets reflect patterns of alcohol outlet use.

From Science Daily’s account:

“Over the past four decades, public health researchers have come to recognize that although most drinkers safely purchase and enjoy alcohol from alcohol outlets, these places are also associated with serious alcohol-related problems among young people and adults,” said Paul J. Gruenewald, senior research scientist at the Prevention Research Center and corresponding author for the study.
“In the early studies, researchers believed associations were due to increased alcohol consumption related to higher alcohol outlet densities,” added Richard Scribner, D’Angelo Professor of Alcohol Research at the LSU School of Public Health. “However, as the research area has matured, the relations appear to be far more complex. It seems that alcohol outlets represent an important social institution within a neighborhood. As a result, their effects are not limited to merely the consequences of the sale of alcohol.”

So while admitting the problem is very complex, they nonetheless go on to leap to some pretty simple conclusions, that don’t seem at all supported by the evidence. At a minimum, their conclusions are only one of many possible reasons for the results their data seems to show, but which in no way leads to one inescapable conclusion, as they seem to think.

As my Bulletin reader Pete succinctly puts it:

It strikes me as another example of a giant leap of logic between an observed correlation and implied causation. There’s a link between, on the one hand, the residential ZIP Codes of patients of certain ages discharged from hospital for certain injuries, and on the other, the number of bars, restaurants, and liquor stores in those same ZIP Codes. Interesting, perhaps, but the real question is why?

Exactly. Why indeed?

But the truly scary bit is in their half-baked conclusions.

The key message, said both Gruenewald and Scribner, is that a neighborhood’s alcohol environment plays a role in regulating the risks that youth and young adults will be exposed to as they mature.
“From a prevention perspective, this represents an important refocusing of priorities, away from targeting the individual to targeting the community,” said Scribner. “This is hopeful because a community-based approach that addresses the over concentration of alcohol outlets in a neighborhood where youth injuries are a problem is relatively easy compared with interventions targeting each youth individually.”

So liquor stores are already subject to strict zoning in many places, will this be used to further isolate them next to the adult bookstores at the edge of towns? Won’t that just increase drunk driving?

Again, I turn to Pete’s assessment.

With no other supporting evidence, the study’s authors appear to suggest that more of these “alcohol outlets” in your neighborhood lead to more assaults, accidents, etc. They make this assertion despite the fact that the hospital data they used doesn’t say whether or not alcohol was even involved in those cases. Moreover, the ZIP Code of one’s residence is often not the ZIP Code where one purchases and consumes their alcohol; where we live and where we drink are not the same, particularly at the spatial resolution of ZIP Codes.
If they really want to explain the empirical patterns they found, I suggest the researchers look at other factors that might correlate with the geography of alcohol outlets. Check zoning ordinances, for example, and the neighborhoods in which such outlets are allowed. My guess is you’d find nearby residences populated disproportionately by less affluent households, ones who are either: (a) at more risk of being involved in an accident or assault regardless of any connection to alcohol, and/or (b) are less likely to have health insurance and thus more likely to end up in a hospital emergency room following minor altercations and accidents that would be treated on an outpatient basis in a more affluent part of town.
There are no doubt plenty of possible explanations; the quickness with which researches will jump to the conclusion that it’s the alcohol’s fault never ceases to amaze me.

Indeed, that is the mystery and the trouble, especially as this is the sort of thing that neo-prohibitionist groups, spearheaded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have been spending millions of dollars on, and not surprisingly getting the results that they want to further their agenda. There are research groups funded by the brewing industry that come to opposite conclusions, of course, but those are usually discounted or discredited for that affiliation, yet the media rarely does the same to studies like this one, not even bothering to ask about the funding or the agenda of the group. That such studies can then be published in “legitimate” science journals makes them even less likely to be questioned, even though that’s exactly what the media should be doing.

Don’t worry, it’s the not the individual person who abuses alcohol and good sense that’s at fault here, it’s the community where he lives. As a Monty Python skit once suggested, with a Bobby investigating a murder: “society’s to blame? Let’s lock them up instead.”

British Hypocrisy On Beer & Health

December 17, 2009 By Jay Brooks

I take no pleasure, though a certain perverse comfort, in the fact that America is not alone in its hypocrisy when it comes to alcohol policy and its government heath organizations. Today in the BBC News is another example of this phenomenon. (Thanks to Pete Brown for pointing this one out.)

In a title no doubt intended to inspire fear and paranoia, Parents Giving Children Alcohol Fuels Binge Drinking, Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s chief medical officer, warned parents that “letting children taste alcohol to ready them for adulthood was ‘misguided'” and claimed “[e]vidence showed that this could lead to binge drinking in later life.” Curiously, he offered no support whatsoever for this so-called evidence apart from saying it. You’d think the reporter might have asked him for that evidence, but no. Way to probe for the story, Marty.

Donaldson also claimed, again without any support, that “[t]he science is clear – drinking, particularly at a young age, a lack of parental supervision, exposing children to drink-fueled events and failing to engage with them as they grow up are the root causes from which our country’s serious alcohol problem has developed.” The problem with that statement is that what he’s complaining about is that some parents give their children alcohol in a controlled environment, specifically NOT with a “lack of parental supervision,” etc. that he then claims is the problem. That makes it a problem that’s effectively the opposite of the one he starts out fomenting about and is indicated in the article’s headline. I should also mention that unlike most U.S. states, UK parents can legally “give their children alcohol at home from the age of five onwards.”

But, they continue, “[r]ates of teenage drunkenness are higher amongst both the children of parents who drink to excess and the children of parents who abstain completely.” So read that again. Kids drink more later in life if their parents either drink too much or not at all. That suggests that children of moderate drinkers do not, and the only way those children would know their parents are moderate drinkers if if they actually saw them drinking, something neo-prohibitionists are decidedly against.

Then again, as if forgetting that he began with the premise that parents giving their kids alcohol was the problem, he acknowledges. “Whilst parents have a greater influence on their children’s drinking patterns early on, as they grow older their friends have a greater influence. It is therefore crucial for parents to talk to their children about alcohol and its effects.” Talk, apparently, but not model responsible behavior or educate their children about alcohol.

But the upshot at the end is another opinion altogether, and one that contradicts everything that’s come before it.

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, said: “We know that adults who drink sensibly tend to pass these habits on and that some families choose to introduce alcohol to their children younger than 15 in a supportive environment.”

Well, if moderate drinking parents pass their responsible habits to their children — which I also believe they do — and some accomplish that by introducing alcohol to their kids successfully, then how exactly is this the problem that Dr. Donaldson seems to think it is? I tend to put my faith in the doctor who specializes in alcohol and health — Gilmore — rather than the administrator at the top, but perhaps that’s just me. I may simply be responding to the most reasonable position, and the one I happen to agree with.

So essentially, this article starts out with a bold headline and scary quotes from one of the country’s top docs, offered with no support whatsoever, and yet it turns out if you read all the way through it, that what they started out trying to scare people about isn’t even really true, settled or consistent. Of course, I learned in my college journalism classes that many readers tend to read the headline and maybe a paragraph or two, before their interest wanes and they move on. That’s why I was taught to put all the pertinent information in the early paragraphs and not leave it for a trick ending that contradicts the premise. (To be fair, I often ignore that advice, too, but not when I’m writing for a newspaper.) To me, that suggests an agenda on the part of either the author or the publisher. Surely an editor would have noticed the article wasn’t even internally consistent. But whatever the reason it was written this way, it certainly did beer or the truth no favors.

Bone Density Strengthened By Moderate Beer Drinking

December 16, 2009 By Jay Brooks

Although Reuters only recently wrote about this new study, Moderate Drinking May Help Build Bone Density, it’s based on a study published in February in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. According to the journal abstract:

Goal: Our aim was to determine the association between intake of total alcohol or individual alcoholic beverages and bone mineral density.
Design: Adjusting for potential confounding factors, we examined alcohol intakes and BMD at 3 hip sites and the lumbar spine in 1182 men and in 1289 postmenopausal and 248 premenopausal women in the population-based Framingham Offspring cohort (age: 29–86 yrs.).
Results: Men were predominantly beer drinkers, and women were predominantly wine drinkers. Compared with nondrinkers, hip BMD was greater (3.4–4.5%) in men consuming 1–2 drinks/d of total alcohol or beer, whereas hip and spine BMD were significantly greater (5.0–8.3%) in postmenopausal women consuming >2 drinks/d of total alcohol or wine. Intake of >2 drinks/d of liquor in men was associated with significantly lower (3.0–5.2%) hip and spine BMD than was intake of 1–2 drinks/d of liquor in men. After adjustment for silicon intake, all intergroup differences for beer were no longer significant; differences for other alcohol sources remained significant. Power was low for premenopausal women, and the associations were not significant.
Conclusions: Moderate consumption of alcohol may be beneficial to bone in men and postmenopausal women. However, in men, high liquor intakes (>2 drinks/d) were associated with significantly lower BMD. The tendency toward stronger associations between BMD and beer or wine, relative to liquor, suggests that constituents other than ethanol may contribute to bone health. Silicon appears to mediate the association of beer, but not that of wine or liquor, with BMD. Other components need further investigation.

There was nothing ambiguous about the results of the study, “it’s very clear,’ said Dr. Katherine Tucker of Boston’s Tufts University that the positive effect on bone density from beer and wine is “larger than what we see for any single nutrient, even for calcium.”

From the Reuters article:

Men who had a glass or two of wine or beer daily had denser bones than non-drinkers, the researchers found, but those who downed two or more servings of hard liquor a day had significantly lower BMD than the men who drank up to two glasses of liquor daily.
The women who drank more than two glasses a day of alcohol or wine had greater BMD than the women who drank less. Nonetheless, this finding shouldn’t be seen as meaning that the more a woman drinks the better it is for her bones, Tucker noted; there were simply not that many women in the study who drank much more than this.
Beer is an excellent source of silicon, a mineral needed for bone health that has become increasingly rare in the modern diet, the researcher noted. Beer’s silicon content accounted for at least some of its bone-building effects in men, she added; there were too few women who drank beer to draw conclusions about how the mineral affected female bone density.

Sounds like you your bones will thank you for drinking beer moderately. A beer a day keeps the bone doctor away?

A Heavenly Take on BrewDog’s Brouhaha

December 4, 2009 By Jay Brooks

You may recall that earlier in the week I wrote about British beer writer Roger Protz and his remarks regarding BrewDog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin. I don’t believe I was alone in thinking his observations were not the highlight of a long, distinguished career. I just read the response of Thank Heaven for Beer, and Mike’s take, in a post entitled Roger Protz Gets it Wrong: An Argument of Assumptions and Insult is nothing short of brilliant. Based on its length and the passion of his arguments, I have to count Mike as a kindred spirit. Well done.

Tactical Penguin Goes Nuclear

November 30, 2009 By Jay Brooks

Unless you’ve been ducking and covering under a rock, you no doubt saw that, while we were sitting down to eat turkey on Thursday, Scotland’s BrewDog released Tactical Nuclear Penguin, which they’re touting as the new champion “world’s strongest beer.” Weighing in at a robust 32% a.b.v., it bested the current American contender, Samuel Adams Utopias, by a whopping 5%. As is typical of the self-styled punks of beer, the release was amid controversy. Predictably, anti-alcohol groups in the UK wasted no time denouncing the beer’s strength as irresponsible, a laughable claim given Scotland’s whisky industry. Jack Law, head of Scotland’s own Alcohol Focus Scotland, said “it is child-like attention-seeking by a company that should be more responsible. The fact that they have achieved a new world record is not admirable. It is a product with a lot of alcohol in it – that’s all. To dress it up as anything else is cynical. It’s as strong as whisky, so you have to ask whether this is actually a beer or a spirit – it’s clearly a spirit.” So obviously the Scots have no shortage of ignorant blowhards in their neo-prohibitionist organizations, too. The fact that there are only 500 bottles and each one sells for £30 (almost $50) and is only a 330 ml (roughly 11.2 oz.) would suggest this is not cause for widespread panic, as it’s hardly going to be selling out of the local Tesco anytime soon.

Perhaps more surprising, one of BrewDog’s bitterest critics of late has been Roger Protz, the grand old man of CAMRA and British beer writing generally. I usually have great respect for Roger and all he’s done for beer, but he seems to have lost his mooring on this one and drifted out into the waters off insaneland. In today’s BrewDog Go Bonkers , he calls the BrewDog lads all sorts of unflattering names and accuses them of all manner of impropriety, even incorrectly accusing the new beer of not actually being a beer — it clearly is — and gets the barest details of its manufacture wrong, despite the fact that BrewDog’s website includes a video explaining how they created Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

He even throws his hat into the ring with the likes of Jack Law, head of Alcohol Focus Scotland, which I find almost unforgivable, especially given Law’s churlish quote about BrewDog’s “childlike attention-seeking.” Um, gentlemen, what exactly do you think marketing is? The very point is to get attention. You can disagree with the way a company goes about the marketing of their products, but calling it “childlike” or suggesting that it’s seeking attention is like saying the goal of advertising is to sell things. Duh. Paging Captain Obvious.

tnp-1
James Watt in his penguin suit, with his newest beer.

Just two weeks earlier, in Enough Is Enough, Protz was again telling BrewDog’s James Watt and Martin Dickie it was time they “grew up and stopped behaving like a couple of precocious teenagers standing on a street corner with back-to-front baseball caps screaming for attention.” Wow. Watts referred to Protz, when he retweeted this, as “Grandpa Protz” and I think he may be onto it. I can’t imagine telling a brewer to grow up in print. That takes more cheek than I possess. They’re all adults, conducting their business the way they want to. But apparently taking their cue more from American sensationalist brewers than the often stodgy traditions of UK beer really ruffled Protz’s feathers. I know Roger to have strong opinions and to be a great champion of English brewing traditions, but these two anti-BrewDog posts seem more like personal attacks, as if they’ve offended him directly. As much as I hate to say it, he comes across as out of touch, a sentiment apparently shared by a great number of people who left comments to his posts. There were an enormous number pointing out the flaws in his reasoning and calling him on being set in his ways and unable to appreciate anything outside classic English beer’s range. Read the comments, they’re as illuminating as Protz himself, and are in many cases highly entertaining on their own.

tnp-2
James Watt out of his penguin suit, with bottles of Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

From the press release:

This beer is about pushing the boundaries, it is about taking innovation in beer to a whole new level. It is about achieving something which has never before been done and putting Scotland firmly on the map for progressive, craft beers.
This beer is bold, irreverent and uncompromising. A beer with a soul and a purpose. A statement of intent. A modern day rebellion for the craft beer proletariat in our struggle to over throw the faceless bourgeoisie oppression of corporate, soulless beer.’
The Antarctic name inducing schizophrenia of this uber-imperial stout originates from the amount of time it spent exposed to extreme cold. This beer began life as a 10% imperial stout 18 months ago. The beer was aged for 8 months in an Isle of Arran whisky cask and 8 months in an Islay cask making it our first double cask aged beer. After an intense 16 month, the final stages took a ground breaking approach by storing the beer at -20 degrees for three weeks to get it to 32%.
For the big chill the beer was put into containers and transported to the cold store of a local ice cream factory where it endured 21 days at penguin temperatures. Alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water. As the beer got colder BrewDog Chief Engineer, Steven Sutherland decanted the beer periodically, only ice was left in the container, creating more intensity of flavours and a stronger concentration of alcohol for the next phase of freezing. The process was repeated until it reached 32%.

Pete Brown, by contrast, has a far more measured reaction to BrewDog’s new beer. We agreed on what was the best part of the press release.

Beer has a terrible reputation in Britain, it’s ignorant to assume that a beer can’t be enjoyed responsibly like a nice dram or a glass of fine wine. A beer like Tactical Nuclear Penguin should be enjoyed in spirit sized measures. It pairs fantastically with vanilla bean white chocolate it really brings out the complexity of the beer and complements the powerful, smoky and cocoa flavours.

Pete takes the right approach IMHO, wanting to focus on the beer itself, which he describes as “an Imperial Stout that has been matured in wooden casks for eighteen months. It has then been frozen to minus twenty degrees at the local ice cream factory in Fraserburgh. By freezing the beer to concentrate it this way, they get the alcoholic strength.” Hard to say what it might taste like, but Pete speculates it will have “very rich, smooth, mellow and complex flavour.” Also, like him, I’m certainly keen to find out. I recently attended a Utopias beer dinner, my third tasting of this year’s version, which is 27%, tantalizingly close to Penguin’s 32%. It’s a wonderful beer, but its release was not accompanied by the frenzy of this beer. Likewise, other very strong beers like Schorschbräu (at 31%), Hair of the Dog Dave (at 29%), as far as I know, did not cause any beer writers to scold them for their efforts. So what’s the difference?

As to the question of whether or not it’s beer, Pete continues:

I once attended a breakfast hosted by Jim Koch, founder of Samuel Adams, father of the awesome Utopias. I asked him a similar question — is this still beer? — and was inspired by his answer. He said something along the lines of beer has been around for thousands of years. Over that time it has evolved continually, and the pace of evolution has picked up considerably in the last couple of centuries. “How arrogant would we have to be to say that in this time, our time, we’ve done everything with beer that can be done? That we’ve perfected beer?” he asked me.
This is why when I love Brew Dog, I really do love them. It’s easy — and not always inaccurate — to accuse them of arrogance. But not when they do something like this. It’s far more arrogant to say ‘we can’t possibly improve on our beer’ than it is to never stop trying to do precisely that. In my marketing role, I often hear brewers talk about something like a slightly different bottle size and refer to it as ‘innovation’. Brew Dog are genuine innovators on a global stage, redefining what beer can actually be.

I guess I just don’t understand the bombastic reaction the release of this beer produced and the way in which it and the brewer’s intentions have been misinterpreted. Why wouldn’t any beer lover want to try it? After all, it really should be about the beer.

brewdog-penguin

Inventing Binge Drinking

November 30, 2009 By Jay Brooks

drunk
I’ve long railed against the various governmental health department definitions of “binge drinking” as being out of touch with reality and self-serving to anti-alcohol groups. In the U.S., the CDC defines binge drinking as “five drinks in a row” and in the UK it’s too many “units of alcohol” in a given day (or number of hours). But that wasn’t always how it was defined.

In a recent issue of the Social History of Medicine, an Oxford Journal, social scientists Virginia Berridge, Rachel Herring and Betsy Thom published Binge Drinking: A Confused Concept and its Contemporary History.

Here’s the summary of the article:

Binge drinking is a matter of current social, political and media concern. It has a longterm, but also a recent, history. This paper discusses the contemporary history of the concept of binge drinking. In recent years there have been significant changes in how binge drinking is defined and conceptualised. Going on a ‘binge’ used to mean an extended period (days) of heavy drinking, while now it generally refers to a single drinking session leading to intoxication. We argue that the definitional change is related to the shifts in the focus of alcohol policy and alcohol science, in particular in the last two decades, and also in the role of the dominant interest groups.

To me, one of the key points of this article is how the definition has changed to create a panic of increasing binge drinkers when it’s far more likely rates are roughly the same, only the definition has changed so that it not only seems like the problem has grown worse, but so that anti-alcohol advocates have a convenient new method by which they can base ever more draconian policy demands.

Binge drinking as a concept has a distant history: but it also has a recent one. The term has come in recent years to describe two quite distinct phenomena. First, it is used to describe a pattern of drinking that occurs over an extended period (usually several days) set aside for the purpose. This is the ‘classic’ definition, linked to clinical definitions of the disease of alcoholism, as in Jellinek’s 1960 classification. Secondly, binge drinking has come to be used to describe a single drinking session leading to intoxication, often measured as the consumption of more than a specific number of drinks on one occasion, often by young people. There is no consensus on how many drinks constitutes this version of binge drinking—how much alcohol—and a variety of ‘cut-offs’ are used.
The second meaning has become prominent in recent years, is used extensively in research and informs UK policy. The ‘new’ definition has largely, but by no means entirely replaced the ‘classic’ definition, and both terms co-exist, if somewhat uneasily at times, in the alcohol field. Thus, it was evident from our research that there has been a shift in recent history in the meaning of the term. What was less clear was how the current confused definition of binge drinking has come to hold sway in public and policy discussions when it seems to be different from definitions which operated in the past. This is an issue which has implications for policy. But it is also a change which throws light on the relationship between science and policy. Our overall hypothesis, which is set out in this discussion paper, is that the definitional change must be related to the shifts in the focus of alcohol policy and alcohol science, in particular in the last two decades, and also to the role of the dominant interest groups in the alcohol field. It is not a change simply in the types of people drinking and the ways in which they drink, but rather an issue of perception which tells us something about the ways in which science and policy interact. [My emphasis.]

And the perception, as well as the target, has indeed changed. While binge drinkers used to be thought of as solitary older males, today the binge drinking “focus is on women and young people.” Although they’re careful in the wording of the article, I think it’s clear they’re saying that the shift in defining binging has been a bad idea, as it’s taken the focus away from the people who really need help and placed it on a more convenient target that allows neo-prohibitionist groups to sound the alarm about the problems of underage drinking — the children, always the children. People naturally want to protect kids from harm, and so it’s much easier to advance destructive alcohol policy under the rubric of underage drinking issues. I’d argue that this is even likely the reason for the shift in the definition, to advance the anti-alcohol agenda more effectively. Fear is always more effective than truth, sadly, in motivating people.

Among the journal article’s conclusions:

Policy makers should be aware of the context in which they operate. Concepts do not appear out of thin air, but have their own history. This study can in fact be seen as feeding in ‘evidence’ to policy on the rational model. On a more theoretical level, this change of definitions over time is also a case study of evidence and policy itself. It tells us how science interacts with policy making and the policy environment.

Exactly. In this case, the science was manipulated and created to further a specific anti-alcohol agenda over the last two decades. As a result, everyone I know is a binge drinker. That’s what happens when science no longer reflects reality but instead is used to remake it.

The American Beer Question

November 30, 2009 By Jay Brooks

The American beer question, simply put — what is an “American Beer” — has been much debated in recent years, especially in the wake of InBev’s purchase of Anheuser-Busch last year. In The Daily Campus, a Connecticut student newspaper, author Tom Godwin wonders aloud in his essay The American Beer.

What exactly is an American beer? I’ve been asking myself that question a lot the last few days. Is it simply a beer that was first made in America, or is it a beer that is better when made here than anywhere else? What about an old style with a new American twist; does that make it American or simply an imitation?

It’s a question that hasn’t yet been answered with complete satisfaction, and he definitely adds some interesting thoughts to the debate. Most of all, I like that as a young man, he’s proud and supportive of American innovation. He opines that “American brewers are never satisfied with what they are doing, and that is the true ideal of beer in this country.” He gets it, unlike older writers who cling to tradition instead (but more about that in a post later today).

But it’s his conclusion that sticks with me.

American beer, just like its people, is an extreme melting pot of creativity, tradition, capitalism and an unnerving sense of complete disregard for reality. I don’t think I’d have it any other way.

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