In these exciting new times, we are suddenly aware of the need to sift the news, seeking out the alternative facts and hidden interests to cast aside. It’s normal to want to be on the winning side but, as this stuff gets layered by the shed load, we need to take a responsible approach and act like adults.
As much as anything, this applies to the brewing yap-o-sphere. Fortunately some folks are putting their big boy pants on and debunking the fibs, as we see today in Outside magazine’s article “Sorry, Folks, Beer Isn’t a Health Food” in which we find this particularly telling observation:
…sometimes research—especially on nutrition—is overly reductionist. Food writer Michael Pollan opines about the dangers of studying single nutrients in his 2007 book, In Defense of Food, saying, “A nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another.” As you’ll see, some of these beer studies look at only a single compound within the beer and extrapolate results from there, when really, there is likely more going on.
Every time some altfactiod blurts out onto social media about the magical properties of beer, the interested mid-rangers gather like sharks to a wiff. Hallelujah! If life were only that easy.
I thought of that nutrition point when I went through Pollan’s books back then but didn’t make much of it. I thought of it again this week when, again, a saw a photo of a good young keen beer writer with the slightly jaundiced hue. I worry. A few months ago, Maureen Ogle tweeted a link to a study that talked about how beer health studies were so selective, never took the net effect into account. I lost the link but remembered the lesson. Your health? It’s operating on the net effect.
That article? It’s got a great conclusion. Let me ruin it for you. Beer’s pretty okay. Beer isn’t the new kale.