Health benefits of beer cited by the Wall Street Journal - Brief Article

Modern Brewery Age, August 19, 2002

The August 13th edition of the Wall Street Journal included a lead story on the potential health benefits of moderate beer consumption.

The article seems to have been spurred by a seminar on "beer and health" put on by the National Beer Wholesalers Association. The reporter's interest seems to have been piqued by an NBWA press release that stated: "Eat right, exercise and drink a beer a day to keep the doctor away."

The publication of the article, in a an influential national forum like the Wall Street Journal, represents a great coup for NBWA president David Rehr and the NBWA's "Beer Belongs" campaign.

The article cited studies compiled over the past 20 years that have found beer can boost spirits, reduce stress and protect against heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, diabetes and dementia.

The article discussed the work of Norman D. Kaplan, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who has studied alcohol's impact on health as part of his 40 years of research into the causes and treatment of hypertension. He concludes that "the benefits of drinking moderate amounts of alcohol is well beyond contention."

Dr. Kaplan told the Journal about two recent large-scale studies that honed in on beer: in one, a look at 70,000 female nurses showed that those who drank moderate amounts of beer had less hypertension than did nurses who drank either wine or spirits. He also points to a survey of 128,934 adults in the Kaiser Permanente managed-care system. It showed that male beer drinkers among the group were at a statistically significant lower risk of coronary-artery disease than were men who drank red wine, white wine or spirits.

Dr. Kaplan told the Journal that new evidence also suggests that beer, because of mechanisms that "are not all clearly understood," may help increase bone density, thus decreasing risk of fractures. And it also could raise by 10% to 20% the so-called good cholesterol" levels in some people, thereby helping to ward off coronary-heart disease and related afflictions such as dementia. Beer, he adds, is also rich in B-vitamins and folates (a form of water-soluble B-vitamin found in green leafy vegetables), both of which help keep homocysteine blood levels in check. Homocysteine is a chemical that, in elevated amounts, has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease.

For those reasons, Dr. Kaplan says, "beer drinking has equal or perhaps more benefit" than wine or spirits. As for the wine claims: "The wine people have done a major snow job" in peddling the notion that wine is superior to beer or spirits, he says.

The Journal noted: "Considering that there are an estimated 80 million regular beer drinkers in America, the emergence of beer as a health palliative is a significant public-relations boost for the $55 billion-a-year beer industry. Of course, beer makers are constrained from directly touting any such benefits on labels or in advertising, hence the efforts by trade groups like the NBWA to spread the word."

WSJ noted the obligatory caveats. For one, researchers define moderate drinking as one drink a day for women and up to two a day for men (a drink itself being a 12-ounce beer, a five-ounce glass of wine or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits.) Conversely, studies show that binge drinking--the consumption of six or more drinks in a day--offers no benefits and puts drinkers at increased risk for obesity and certain types of cancers, liver failure and stroke.

"The binge factor doesn't help your heart at all" and can even lead to immediate problems, such as heart arrhythmias, says Margo Denke, a medical colleague of Dr. Kaplan's at Texas Southwestern Medical School who has done her own health-and-alcohol studies.

But when it comes to beer's general health benefits, Dr. Denke told the Journal, "the science makes sense; beer is distilled from hops and barley and some of the beneficial nutrients are concentrated and passed along."

Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard's School of Public Health, told WSJ that the benefits of moderate drinking may come from the ethanol component in alcohol. "True, beer has B vitamins, but a single beer provides perhaps 2% to 6% of the recommended daily requirement. To think you can get your RDA of that from beer is probably inappropriate," he says.

But Dr. Rimm says the prevailing thinking is that ethanol has significant antithrombotic or anticlotting effects similar to aspirin: Health experts, for perhaps a decade, have recommended an aspirin-a-day regimen for people over 50 to help prevent strokes and heart disease.

More recently, WSJ noted that Dutch and Danish researchers looked at beer and wine side by side in studies; in the Dutch sample, in which participating men drank four glasses of either beer, wine or spirits over three months, beer seemed to be better at helping to control homocysteine levels; a similar Danish study found no distinguishable differences.

Juanita Duggan, head of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America, managed to get in one dig at the end of the WSJ piece. She noted that her trade group stood by studies that have touted the health benefits of red wine. "And besides," she said, "our products will always taste better than theirs."