I’ll Drink To That: The True Effects of Beer by Jerry Brainum 9/26

 

When asked how much milk he drank, Arnold Schwarzenegger reportedly said, Milk is for babies. When you grow up, you have to drink beer. The line has been repeated so often it's become a kind of bodybuilding folklore — Schwarzenegger has since explained that it traces back to his early days training in Munich, Germany, where most bodybuilders drank milk between sets. His gym had a restaurant downstairs that served potent German beer, and that's what he reached for instead. Decades later, one of his yearly rituals is still a trip back to Germany for Oktoberfest, the beer festival that now draws more than six million visitors a year for its mix of carnival games, oompah bands, and, of course, beer.

I once asked Schwarzenegger, half-joking, how American beer stacked up against the German version. He didn't hesitate: American beer, he said, was weak by comparison. It sounded like classic old-country chauvinism — until I checked the numbers. Most American beers run 3 to 5 percent alcohol. One German beer, Schorschbock 57, is literally named for its strength: 57 percent alcohol by volume, more than ten times a typical American lager. Even the everyday stuff served at Oktoberfest doesn't play it safe — the beer comes in steins holding 33 ounces, nearly three times the size of a standard U.S. pour, and more than a quart in a single glass.

So the question worth asking: are the Germans drinking themselves into an early grave, or is there something to the tradition that keeps it (mostly) harmless?

Compared to other alcoholic beverages, beer is relatively benign — at least in its American versions. Beer typically has a lower alcohol content than wine or spirits, and most health authorities agree that alcohol itself is the primary hazard in any alcoholic drink. Beer and wine — red wine especially — have an edge over hard liquor in one respect: alongside the alcohol, they carry compounds like polyphenols that appear to offer some health benefit. For men, the research is fairly consistent: one beer a day appears harmless, and may even confer modest benefits.

For women, the picture is murkier. Some studies have found that women carrying certain gene variants — involved in how the body metabolizes alcohol, and in some cases the BRCA genes tied to breast cancer — may face a higher breast-cancer risk from drinking than women without those variants, even at low intake. The research is still evolving, and effect sizes vary from study to study, but it's enough to suggest that broad claims about "a drink a day being harmless" may need an asterisk for some women. Complicating the picture further, alcohol itself is classified as a neurotoxin — capable of damaging brain cells — and a myotoxin, capable of breaking down muscle tissue, in high enough doses. Given that, how do we square this with the long . . .