Free Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Page B

BAA to spread the word on their behalf.
    About fifty people showed up for this, most of them fashion, spirits, or food journalists who had come for the beer and food. But we all had to take our medicine first (a shrewd move when dealing with the notorious eat-and-run press). We sat through about an hour of presentations by Dr. Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s School of Public Health, and Dr. Norman Kaplan, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
    If it seemed odd at first that two such learned men had come to talk about beer, it soon became clear that their beer research was an adjunct of much more serious matters. Dr. Rimm had spent much of his professional life studying associations between diet and lifestyle in relation to the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Likewise, Dr. Kaplan had wandered into the beer-and-health frontier as part of forty years of research on the causes and prevention of hypertension, which, as a leading factor in strokes, is one of the nation’s biggest killers. Given that as many as 120 million people in the U.S. drink some form of alcohol and collectively consume more than seven billion gallons of it annually, the effects of alcohol on health—bad and good—is a monumental public health issue.
    And both researchers told me later that their findings on beer were really a refinement of the knowledge that began trickling to light more than twenty years ago when credible medical research began to hint at the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption. The most famous report on that subject appeared in the mid-1990s, when news burst on to the scene that red wine was thought to have special properties that made it essentially the healthy alcoholic beverage. At the time, researchers reported the phenomenon as the “French paradox”—the fact that, though the French eat a diet even more fat-rich than do Americans, they have lower coronary disease rates. Looking for an explanation, researchers settled on the red wine that is a staple in the French diet. Red wine contains goodly amounts of chemical compounds called flavonoids—antioxidants that appear to help lower cholesterol levels and hence help prevent the arterial clogging that is a major component of heart disease.
    But a fresh look at that research, plus a raft of new findings, has led scientists to conclude that the original study oversold red wine’s singular advantage. For one thing, the French are thought to underreport coronary deaths and heart disease. And most researchers, Dr. Rimm included, say the original French study didn’t take lifestyle biases into account. “Wine drinkers tend to be people who eat better and exercise more” than the drinkers of beer or spirits, Dr. Rimm told me. “If you don’t factor that in, it makes wine look better.” Dr. Kaplan was a little more blunt. “The wine people have done a major snow job” in peddling the notion of red wine’s position as the only healthful alcoholic beverage.
    The upshot of their presentation was that there have now been so many validated studies on the health benefits of moderate drinking—moderate being the pivotal word—that Dr. Kaplan could proclaim the evidence in alcohol’s favor “is now incontrovertible.” Dr. Rimm added: “My opinion is that regardless of what you die from, it’s better to die as a moderate drinker.”
    And beer, according to Dr. Rimm, absolutely belongs on the list of alcoholic beverages with sanguine effects, though he was reluctant to characterize it as more efficacious than, say, red wine or any other comestible spirit for that matter. Dr. Rimm thinks much of the health-and-alcohol research is pointing toward alcohol’s key component, ethanol, as the chief palliative, though no one quite knows why. One theory is that it acts much like