Beer : Health and Nutrition

26 Chapter One
same way, a wife beater is predisposed to domestic violence from a aw in his character.
The fact that he may enjoy a drink is by no means causally linked. Somebody who
will in ict physical harm on a spouse is not made into such a person by consuming
alcohol, although we might accept that the alcohol may remove inhibitions to increase
the likelihood of it happening. Approximately half of adult males in the US who are
heavy drinkers do not display drink-related personal or social problems, while nearly
a half of those adult males that do have the very problems generally associated with
drinking are not heavy drinkers (Cahalan & Room 1974).
Many laboratories have demonstrated the Mellanby effect (Mellanby 1919): the
concentration of alcohol in the blood rises more rapidly and to higher levels after the
consumption of spirits as opposed to beer (see e.g. Gardiner & Stewart 1968). Takala
et al. (1957) showed that these differences were manifest even when the spirits were
diluted to the alcoholic strength of beer. The differences were displayed in respect of
performance – for example, driving tasks were more impaired for people who had
taken brandy rather than beer (Bjerver & Goldberg 1950). Takala et al. (1957) found
that brandy drinking led to more argumentative and aggressive behaviour than did beer
drinking, even though blood alcohol levels were similar. Boyatzis (1974) made comparable
observations. Pihl and colleagues (1981) feel that the different impact of beer and
spirits is due to different expectations about their effects, and not the different type of
beverage per se. However, we assume that Siamese ghting sh don’t have expectations,
and Raynes and Ryback (1970) found that aggression in such creatures was decreased
by alcoholic beverages, with beer and wine having a greater impact than spirits.
Klein and Pittman (1993) claimed that emotional state impacts on the beverage of
choice. Thus beer drinking increases in response to negative emotions, such as loneliness,
whereas the intake of wine coolers was increased in association with positive emotional
states. Seemingly, married people drink more wine when they are sad and bored.
Of course, we must not ignore the fact that there are substantial differences between
the drinking public in where and when they will consumer beverages of different
types. Also the perception of the different types of beverages varies. Klein and Pittman
(1990) surveyed more than 2000 American adults to nd that underage drinking and
antisocial behaviour were regarded as being associated more with beer and spirits than
with wine. Conversely, Gaines (1985) found that the black population in three cities
regarded beer as a soft drink and unlikely to be harmful. Lang et al. (1983) determined
that undergraduates believed wine to be the most positively regarded of the alcoholic
drinks, while Harford (1979) found that wine was more likely than beer or spirits to be
consumed with a meal. It seems that bar customers taking beer will do so with greater
rapidity and to a greater extent than will those taking other forms of alcohol (Storm &
Cutler 1981; Stockwell et al. 1992).
Surveys seem to suggest that wine consumption is less associated with problems than
is that of beer or spirits (e.g. Adlaf et al. 1993). However, Evenson (1986) found that