Is beer better (or worse) for you than wine?
bbc.com
bbc.com
The main thrust of the talk was that nutritionally, beer and wine should be about equal, but everyone believes that wine is healthy and beer isn't - which is not scientifically accurate.
A more nuanced view: ethanol (alcohol) accounts for nearly all of the cardio-vascular benefits, and thus, beer and wine are equal. Wine contains more anti-oxidants and anti-aging properties, but you would need to get very (very) drunk to get those benefits (well past the Ballmer Peak). Beer, specifically craft beers, have great phytonutrients and macronutrients - and you can get those benefits from a single bottle.
In my opinion: advantage beer.
Some people are trying to make a lower-alcohol, salty beer that would be a real sports-recovery drink.
Anyone here have experience with old-country low-alcohol everyday beverages like sima, kotikalja, kvass, etc? Europe used to have a grand tradition of these low-alcohol "near-beers" or "malt beverages" that people would drink on the farm. They were hydrating and had a lot of the health benefits of above, but since the ethanol was low I'm not sure what effect they had on cardiovascular health.
Also, the Romans and others down south in Europe used to water their wine heavily -- they drank a larger volume through the day but kept ethanol ingestion moderate. I wonder what the health ramifications were.
When I was in high school my dad came back from a trip with a taste for traditional kefir, and brought with him some of the yeast 'grains' that are used to make it. He stuck with it for a few months, enjoying a couple of glasses a day, a jug continuously fermenting in the pantry.
After a while he began to realize that he was more tired than usual in the afternoons and felt like taking a nap almost every day. As it turns out, the fermented kefir contains a small amount of alcohol–seemingly just enough to make him a bit drowsy. Maybe not even enough to be noticeable if you're doing something physical, but only if you're focused and working at a desk.
I don't know if it's possible to get an equivalent here in the United States - I've tried bottled and other varieties, and they all tasted like crap-flavored soda. Went back to Moscow last summer, and got the good stuff - just like I remember.
Leipziger is the standard bearer, imo; most American versions don't add enough salt.
Whilst I think that is, ahem, unlikely, the monopolisation of beer production by a shrinking cabal of vested interests is hammering beer quality here. And the evidence certainly suggests that unwanted chemicals - either in the product itself or introduced through badly maintained pipes in pubs - have a significant part to play. The article references 'congeners' as the culprits here, but it is noticeable that, eg, one can go on a significant bender in Germany and come up fresh as a daisy the next day, presumably thanks to that nation's enlightened beer purity laws.
Some types of beer (specifically some types of bottle fermented) tend to lead towards leaving unfermented sugars in the bottle. Sugar can cause hangovers on its own, so combined with alcohol and fusel oils, could contribute extra towards a hangover beyond just the general dehydration.
I had a friend of mine complaining once that Belgian-style beers tended to cause more powerful hangovers, and halfway through telling him it was all in his head, I was interrupted by a more experienced craft brewer who interjected that it may well not be.
The science of it is pretty interesting. http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/1080019/Chemistr...
You can avoid the worst of that if you drink a lot of water at the end of the night.
"beer before wine, fine
wine before beer, queer"
*Not scientifically proven
Beer before liquor, never been sicker
Liquor before beer, you're in the clear Grape or grain, but never the twain
Sing it with me!
125 ml of wine at 8% is one British unit.
So when people say "one glass of wine is one unit" they're often under-estimating how much they're drinking. Most wine will be sold in 175 ml servings (called a small glass) and at much stronger than 8% ABV. 12% is normal. 175 ml of 12% is just over 2 units. A more normal 250 ml serving would be 3 units.
Increased risk drinking is a significant cost to Public Health and the NHS.
Anyway, here in the antipodes, we refer to 'standard drinks', which is both better and worse than 'units'. Better, because it's more accessible to the layperson, and worse, because most normal volumes that one drinks is more than one 'standard drink' - a can of 'normal' beer is 1.4, and a glass of wine is 1.5 (certain servings of these equal 1 standard drink - it really depends on your drinking pattern)
http://www.alcohol.gov.au/internet/alcohol/publishing.nsf/co...
Shots are also 25ml, so one shot is usually one unit.
Statistics: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/ras51-re...
(It's also just a "unit".)
On the other hand, paleo is an actively harmful diet[1], so I want to encourage a scientific approach to nutrition. But I don't want to discourage people who are more interested in fads than science from being concerned about health, either. Argh.
The marketing is endlessly hilarious, though. My cat's food has a gluten-free label, no joke.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/09/10/3842158.ht...
Pet homeopathy also makes me laugh.
Example: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/going-gluten-free-just-be...
Having said that, it is regrettable that so many Americans have decided to "cure" a host of physical and pshychological maladies with the "gluten-free" diet. Every moment you spend chasing a figment is a moment you don't spend fixing a real problem.
The symptoms of gluten intolerance are not serious enough for a doctor to be interested, it is also easy enough to try changing your diet for a week or two in order to see if it makes a difference.
A good doc would tell you to consider testing your way through FODMAPS since there have been a bunch of recent publications about them in major medical journals. As the GP poster points out, though, many people might take the idea of an elimination diet and figure they can eat all the gluten-free toaster waffles they want, which would continue to cause all the same problems if FODMAPS rather than gluten were the problem. Most starch-filled gluten free replacement foods are not good for your health anyway.
Anyway, yes, that's what I've read as well.
* People with IBS may find their symptoms improved by going on a low-FODMAP diet. That does take out bread, but it also might involve taking out onions because of their sugar content. Doesn't have anything to do with gluten per se.
* People with digestive problems may find that alcohol is an irritant. But then tequila should also be dropped or moderated; doesn't have to do with gluten.
* People who do an elimination diet and find that standard American bread upsets their stomach may also find that more fermented items, in moderation, aren't a problem. American bread will cause me embarrassing borborygmus and other digestive problems, but moderate consumption of beer or northern european sourdough rye is not bad. Someone once told me this was a difference in reaction to the glutenin vs gliadin proteins that make up gluten, but who knows. No one knows the science yet, but bread sure does give me non-celiac trouble!
For beer and wine, it's really useful and interesting to consider the effects of the processing and fermentation. Malted barley is used in most beers: you sprout and then roast the barley, releasing and cooking all kinds of sugars that you would not find in beef-barley soup. Barley has hordein instead of gliadin (rye has secalin, oats have avenin). Then the yeast crunches through those sugars to create alcohol and carbon dioxide and who knows what else. Fermentation often does have an effect on these proteins and can in fact have an effect on the amino acids that people with celiac are sensitive to, but we don't really know what's going on entirely. There are some Italians who can make gluten-free sourdough wheat bread in a lab just through getting the right yeasts going.
Beer, wine, pickles, yogurts, sausages, fermented shark... With all we are finding out about microbiomes inside our guts, there is going to be an explosion of commercialization of these traditional fermented foods. Start your own now so that you don't have to be reliant on corporate mega-strains in the future! Microbiome independence now! :)
Starting your own fermentation culture is dead simple. The problem is that your local strains of dust-borne microbes are not likely to be very tasty, or as useful as a more domesticated culture. So just like there are companies who make money on open-source software, there will be companies that make money on particular freely-available fermentation cultures. There already are such companies.[0] There are also informal networks of people who trade cultures through the mail. That's how I got my kefir culture.
There seems to be a term NCGS emerging - Non Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity. It's somewhat at the not-yet-proven-to-exist stage. For us though, we're in no doubt: given a regular gluten-containing morsel, my wife's face next day will show swelling and she'll be fatigued for days, plus be hit by abdominal cramps and various other things. Since she cut out gluten this has only ever happened "blind" btw, i.e. waking up with symptoms then figuring "ah that piece of XYZ must have had gluten" after the fact. She never eats gluten intentionally.
It's been interesting - she was all set to go onto thyroid medication for life, and had really quite severe symptoms, sometimes requiring hospitalisation. Cutting out gluten fixed them all within weeks.
We've seen it suggested that gluten proteins resemble thyroid molecules, hence the immune system's attack on gluten leading to those symptoms indicating thyroid dysfunction.
It makes you wonder: how many people with low level health complaints could do better by just trying a gluten free diet for a couple of weeks.
Or she's allergic to something else.
6 months of no-symptoms-barring-accidental-gluten is proving somewhat compelling, after 5 years of mounting health issues.
This is an article we came across that was quite a eureka moment, my wife was a classic Hashimoto's case hence our initial route with endochrinology specialists: