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Beer Added To The Food Pyramid
Alehound writes " Beer Is Food: The US Government labeled beer(alcohol) as a drug, BeerAdvocate.com begs to differ as they inform their reader that beer can be a part of your diet in a healthy way. Beer does a body good? So the "Beer Gut" is a myth? So why the hell do I have a gut? And yes these guys do drink beer for breakfast." It's only 10 in the morning, I'm dumping out the half pot of coffee left, and cracking open a Boddingtons! Do it!
"Buy my product - it is healthy!" Who do they think they can fool with this crap?
You get that northern slop in the U.S? Odd.
The FDA determines the proper adult dose for a drug by giving increasingly higher doses to a bunch of rats until 50% of them die.
I know this because I was told about a supplement that tried to get FDA approval as a drug, but it failed because it could never kill the rats. Therefore it could only be approved as a food (having strange effects on the product's marketability).
So perhaps the FDA got some rats really drunk and they actually got half of them to die...
You have a gut, not because of the beer, but what you eat with it. Beer stimulates your appetite. Read about it here.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
It can be a wonderfully complex process and by learning it you are taking part in a time-honored tradition. Plus, you get cheap, good drink.
Or so I've been told.
But even if it doesnt, drinking alcohol also lessens your chance of heart attack.
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I've found that belgium beer is usually pretty high in alcohol. Sometimes up to 10 or 11%. I know that gulden drakk is around 9.x% And it is a mighty fine fruitful beer that has a beautiful aftertaste.
Overall commercial american beer is shite. I've heard americans saying that molson's canadian and labatt blue are 'good' beers. Which I guess they could be if you're used to drinking dog pee. But there are a ton of good canadian beers. You just have to look slightly farther than the tip of your nose.
Big liquor has a powerful lobby. Why do you think the government has come down so hard on tobacco in recent years, but basically leaves alcohol alone?
Hrmm... there's many more positives to beer. Beer really is a social drink... it's the man's drink. Beer and pubs go together well.
Contrary to the article though, beer can be fattening... you have to remember that you're only going to put on weight if Ein != Eout - the body processes sugars and carbohydrates are broken down into sugars before being processed - that's why carbohydrates are a long-term energy source and sugary things like fruit and chocolate are short-term energy sources.
Six schooners have enough energy to run your average male for day. So drink in moderation and make sure to keep up the exercise and maintain a balanced diet. (And fat people wonder why they're fat when they eat McDonalds everyday and drive or take the lift everywhere!)
Finally, an article where my signature is at home! =]
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Everything is poision in the right amounts. Beer is no different. Matter of fact is that it's loaded with nutritients. As stated, however, in the right amounts it is no longer good for the body. True story: A scientist was once asked what food he would bring to a desert island. What did he answer? Beer. I, on the other hand, suggested to my unit that we should ask our commanders if we could bring a keg out in the field.
"So unmerciful is life, that everything afterwards is too late."
Beer is the worst thing you can eat/drink. Because of its high glycemic index you get fat from drinking it. Hot tip for all overweight geeks: Read the food book by Michelle Montignac, "Eat Yourself Slim". There you'll find the real truth, how to keep fit just by eating certain stuff. This guy Montignac wrote this book without the main intention of getting any profit, thats why it reveals the truth. If everyone started to listen to this dude a lot of capitalist would be very unhappy, (because then their usless diet pills or other stupid diet "campaigns" will go to hell).
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There's a rather good explanation for this. Not that I'm defending it, but rather explaining it to understand it and adress it at the root cause.
Prohibition was a scary time for Americans, particularly breweries - most of which went out of business. Prohibition was created by women marching in the streets, complaining that their husbands had become drunks in the saloons. Who could blame them - during the depression, there weren't many jobs to keep them occupied.
When prohibition was repealed, the breweries wanted to create beer that would appeal to women, so that they would become consumers and not vote again for prohibition. So they made their beers lighter, and specialized in the lager field that they felt was more approachable for those who weren't accustomed to drinking beer.
Sadly, America's beer development was stuck on training wheels until about the 80s, when certain individuals started experimenting with brewing their own. This launched a movement where people started becoming more interested in flavor rather than just getting drunk.
In case you haven't been to this side of the pond recently, there are many wonderful breweries that severly stomp on most European breweries which are stuck doing things the way they did around the time that America was discovered. I'd highly reccomend checking out some of these breweries:
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Special section on the New Scientist site
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Now for an alternate take on things... Beer is the root of civilization. Yes, that most lovely of liquids: the Wobbly Pop. Hang on to your brews boys.
Most traditional archaeologists tend to think of civilization as a sort of ladder, and the first few rungs were actually quite slippery. Here's one possible ladder: (there are several)
First, if you want to have a town with art, politics, hookers, etc. the first thing you need is a food supply that is reliable and doesn't move around a lot. Deer, elk, tapirs, camels, elephants, etc. all move around most vexingly. Turnips do not. Agriculture seems like the way to go, but first you need a crop to cultivate. 30,000 years ago that wasn't an easy thing to find. Beans, squash, wheat, turnips, you name it, are all highly domesticated plants that we've been selectively breeding for thousands of years. When agriculture was starting out the ancestors of today's crops just weren't that productive. Take corn for example. Today a stalk of corn puts out great big honking cobs chock full of juicy kernals. 30,000 years ago the stuff looked a lot like grass. It is in fact, more than a little bit unlikely that you could have lived off the stuff back then. (more on that later) So if no suitable crops existed, we had to breed one.
Here we hit a major hang up. Breeding massive changes into plants isn't exactly a speedy process when you *know* what you're doing. How exactly our ancestors ever managed to develop a crop suitable for agriculture is actually quite a hot topic of debate! Still, somehow we managed, but it probably took a while. Even for relatively smart people, it is not inconceivable that this took tens of thousands of years before there was any sort of payoff. So what kept our forefathers going?
Beer.
Living off of primitive wild corn would probably have been impossible. However, collecting relatively small ammounts to ferment into chicha (BEER!) for those important social events (religion?) was a much more reasonable undertaking. Of course, excessive beer consumption does tend to make one lazy, so naturally our fastly-becoming-religious ancestors decided to start throwing a bunch of seeds together in one place so they didn't have to look all over the bloody planet to round up enough for a good er... mass. Gradually they tossed the crappier grass out and the better stuff got inbred, mutated all to hell, and gradually become more and more like the corn of today. Eventually, we got a crop good enough to actually become a dietary staple. Someone might then have said "Hey guys! We can eat this stuff too! F@$* this hunter-gatherer walking-around-all-day BS. Let's just stay here all the time. There's BEER!"
So we have a nice town springing forth from the wilderness. Art, culture, and all the trappings of civilization are flowering forth... and people are shitting in the river. This is baaad. People are getting sick! Fortunately, achohol tends to be safer to drink than brownish water! While the high-proof Canadian beers of today would be a tad difficult to live on, the watered down chicha of the day was just the thing for daily consumption. To this day there are still countries where beer is cheaper than safe drinking water. As a beneficial side effect, people with beer tend to be easier to talk into paying taxes, running off to kill people they've never met before, building pyramids, etc...
Of course, archaeology itself would be nowhere without beer. Seriously, how many major archaeological digs are carried out without beer? Almost any site that has ever been completely excavated is within a short distance of a pub. Occasionally people mount expeditions into the jungles of Yucatan, etc. to discover these fabulous lost cities. They dig for a bit, the beer runs out, and they go home. To any government officials out there who are trying to get some remote lost city excavated, build a pub next to it. The archaeologists will come.