Save The Bees, Save The Beer

March 29, 2015 By Jay Brooks

bee
Beer, of course, is an agricultural product, two of its main ingredients are very dependent on a good harvest. Both hops and barley (and other grains such as wheat and rye) grow best when they’re planted in the right place and the conditions are present to encourage their best selves. I received an e-mail a few days ago with the intriguing message. “Bees pollinate 1/3 of our food, including the hops used to make beer. Save the bees, save the beer.”

The e-mail was about an Indiegogo campaign to create a “community open to anyone who cares about bees, the environment and food,” called BeeWithMe, which will consist of “a dynamic new website that teaches people how easy and fun it is to raise a diverse range of gentle bees.” Unless you’ve been cryogenically frozen recently, you no doubt have heard that bees are disappearing from our environment, which could have devastating consequences for our food supply and our life cycle more generally. Find out how to participate at You Can Help Save the Bees, which begins:

Imagine a world without bees. There would be no blueberries, no cherries, no pumpkins – not even beer.
Here’s the problem: Most farmers depend on a single type of bee to pollinate our food and that bee, the honey bee, has been struggling.
You can be part of the solution and protect our food supply by raising gentle, native bees in your backyard or supporting someone else who does.
Keep your favorite foods on the table by contributing today and joining the BeeWithMe network that will collaborate to raise more native bees and grow more food.

Most of the pledge levels involve getting your own bees, some to simply release in your back yard, up to everything you need to raise your own bees. There are also teacher’s packages for classrooms and levels for entire garden clubs and communities. Please bee generous. And remember, save the bees, save the beer.

3bitesoffood

Real Drunken Monkeys

September 19, 2012 By Jay Brooks

drunken-monkey
When I hear the term “drunken monkey,” I first think of the Chinese martial art, a kind of Kung Fu. There’s also a surprising number of bars and restaurants called Drunken Monkey this or that. But in searching for information on beer in Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Caribbean island nation who celebrates their independence day today, I found an old news report that there are real drunken monkeys. In Beware of Alcoholic Monkeys on St. Kitts, they recount how these monkeys were “originally imported to the island by pirates, [and] were introduced to the tantalizing effects of umbrella-laden mojitos and shots of tequila by tourists a few decades ago. Not surprisingly, they developed a heavy hankering for it.”

A group of scientists from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, along with a foundation on the islands, saw an opportunity and captured 600 monkeys to study their drinking behavior. The monkeys drinking habits broke down into somewhat predictable groups:

Social drinkers: the majority of the monkeys. They prefer alcohol diluted in fruit juice, will only drink in the company of other monkeys, and not before lunch.
Regular drinkers: fifteen percent of the monkeys prefer their alcohol “neat” or diluted in water, not sweetened or diluted with fruit juice. Interestingly, steady drinkers do very well in social groups, and are good leaders. They run troops well, they keep order well, and they’re very dominant. This type of alcoholic monkey is a very functional animal.
Binge drinkers: five percent of the monkeys drink their alcohol fast, get in fights, and drink themselves into a coma. Just as in humans, there are more young males in this group. If this group has unrestricted access to alcohol, they will drink themselves to death within 2-3 months. Binge drinkers differ from regular (or “steady”) drinkers by their drinking patterns rather than by the amounts of alcohol they consume.
Teetotaler: fifteen percent of the monkeys prefer little or no alcohol.

So that breaks down like so:

65% = Social Drinkers
15% = Regular Drinkers
5% = Binge Drinkers
15% = Non-Drinkers

That looks similar to what I’d expect for people, too. Does anybody know how the same groups shake out for Americans, or humans across the world?

The UK’s Guardian summarized the results.

For many years, alcoholism in humans was thought to be purely a learned behaviour — the result of environmental factors. But more recent studies indicate that in humans, the tendency towards alcohol addiction has a genetic component: it tends to run in families. Research has found three regions on the human genome that may be linked to alcoholism. Unfortunately, since these areas contain up to 300 genes, it may be some years before specific “alcohol genes” are identified.
I think it is interesting that, despite living in a tropical paradise, without any economic problems or deprivation, this video clearly documents that some monkeys still become alcoholics. Additionally, this video shows how vervet monkeys’ alcohol use mirrors that of humans, suggesting that they too, have a genetic component. Further, human and vervet monkey DNA shares an 84.2% similarity. So even though it is difficult to study humans’ genetics and patterns of alcohol consumption, researchers can study vervet monkeys. So research is ongoing in these monkeys to better understand their patterns of alcohol use and abuse — valuable since scientists can carefully control the monkeys’ environment and the monkeys can be selectively bred so researchers can better understand the effects of particular genes on behaviour.

The study itself, Alcohol consumption in vervet monkeys: biological correlates and factor analysis of behavioral patterns, doesn’t reveal too much in the abstract, so I have to take the word of the two reports. But it certainly would be interesting to see if it does correlate to human behavior.
Chimp

Drowning One’s Sorrows May Be Genetic

March 16, 2012 By Jay Brooks

fruitfly
The March issue of Science, touted as “the world’s leading journal of original scientific research, global news and commentary, included an article entitled Sexual Deprivation Increases Ethanol Intake in Drosophila. Which may not mean much, until you realize that in plain English it’s essentially “fruit flies who’ve had their sexual advances rejected drink more alcohol.” Here’s the abstract:

The brain’s reward systems reinforce behaviors required for species survival, including sex, food consumption, and social interaction. Drugs of abuse co-opt these neural pathways, which can lead to addiction. Here, we used Drosophila melanogaster to investigate the relationship between natural and drug rewards. In males, mating increased, whereas sexual deprivation reduced, neuropeptide F (NPF) levels. Activation or inhibition of the NPF system in turn reduced or enhanced ethanol preference. These results thus link sexual experience, NPF system activity, and ethanol consumption. Artificial activation of NPF neurons was in itself rewarding and precluded the ability of ethanol to act as a reward. We propose that activity of the NPF–NPF receptor axis represents the state of the fly reward system and modifies behavior accordingly.

Science Magazine’s News Blog featured the article in more layman’s terms as Sexually Rejected Flies Turn to Booze, and described the results as follows.

Offer a male fruit fly a choice between food soaked in alcohol and its nonalcoholic equivalent, and his decision will depend on whether he’s mated recently or been rejected by a female. Flies that have been given the cold shoulder are more likely to go for the booze, researchers have found. It’s the first discovery, in fruit flies, of a social interaction that influences future behavior.

Apparently that’s not the outcome the scientists expected.

The researchers expected all of the flies to prefer alcohol, but that’s not what they found. “You see that the mated males actually have an aversion to the alcohol-containing food,” Shohat-Ophir says. “And the rejected males have a high preference to that food with alcohol.” On average, the rejected males drank four times more alcohol than the mated ones, her team reports.

In the New York Times’ coverage — Learning From the Spurned and Tipsy Fruit Fly — they make the leap to human addiction, which I find a little troubling. “Fruit flies apparently self-medicate just like many humans do, drowning their sorrows or frustrations for some of the same reasons.” Which is okay, so far, but then they quote an alcohol addiction researcher who was not involved in the study, Dr. Markus Heilig, who believes the study “also supported new approaches to treating alcohol dependence,” including the investigation of “several compounds aimed at blunting alcohol urges.” And earlier in the Times’ reporting, they state that the study “suggests that some elements of the brain’s reward system have changed very little during evolution, and these include some of the mechanisms that support addiction.”

But that presupposes that the urge to drink alcohol is always bad, something that people should never do, and that it necessarily leads to addiction. And that, of course, it not the least bit true. Once upon a time, it meant the difference between living long enough to procreate and dying without issue. When it was safer to drink than the water, those humans with a greater tolerance for alcohol survived while those that couldn’t did not. If you’re reading this right now, it’s likely you can thank your ancient ancestors’ ability to handle their drink.

Even today, people who drink moderately tend to outlive those who never drink alcohol. Even those that drink heavily still tend to outlive those who never drink alcohol. It’s just that small fraction of the population that cannot handle alcohol and can be considered alcoholics, whether genetic or social or simply weak-willed. And for their failings, the world is cursed with neo-prohibitionists hell bent on the idea if even one person can’t handle alcohol, then dagnabbit no one should be able to enjoy it.

But so much of this type of research seems to play into their hands, making the assumption — very, very wrong in my opinion — that alcohol is bad for people, and bad for society, and that drinking alcohol always leads to alcoholism. It’s usually the starting premise. But it’s a false premise, because the majority of people who drink alcohol do so responsibly and in moderation and do not fall prey to alcoholism after their first (or tenth, or 100th or 1000th) sip.

And like the rejected fruit fly, sometimes a beer is just the thing to help get over a bitter rejection, or just a long, tough day at work. The calming effect of a beer after work or with dinner is part of a healthy lifestyle for many, many people. For a majority of people, there’s nothing wrong with that, and it does not signal the onset of addiction or any sort of problem whatsoever. And that’s my takeaway from the fruit fly, too. Sometimes you just need a beer to drown your sorrows.

drunk-fruitfly