Monday, February 9, 2015

Thoughts about Zymurgy, Dummy Style

There’s a possibility that no branch of science suffers more at the hands of self-appointed freelancers than nutrition. Every darned fad diet that comes down the pike is the subject of thousands of glowing blog posts, each carefully tailored to suck in eyeballs. Never mind that three months later, the same "nutrition" or "fitness" blogger will be posting another glowing review of a different fad diet…

Those freelancers also hit the pay-for-hits sites, too. Here’s a little piece of rubbish published by someone who calls himself Emge over at DailyTwoCents, an article on “Benefits of Drinking Beer.”¹ We’ll forgive the writer for the spelling and grammatical mistakes since English is not his first language, but we won't forgive the misinformation:
     
"Generally beer is labelled a alcohalic [sic] drink as it has a certain percentage of alcohal. [sic] It also is supposed to give you extra calories and that is generally not considered a good thing. We mst [sic] understand that the main composition of beer is barley water. It is also well known that drinking barley water is good for health. It is very difficult to drink barley water by itself, hence it becomes drinkable when a dash of alcohal [sic] is added to it.."
OK… well, no, beer isn’t barley water with “alcohal” added: barley water is a tea made with boiling water and pearl barley, but the alcohol in beer comes from fermentation of the sugars found in roasted barley by the addition of yeast. Emge went on to claim that the fiber in barley water is good for you (a fad diet claim making the rounds back in 2013-4) and extrapolated that the same fiber in all the barley water in beer is likewise good for you.
Unfortunately for our Dumbass of the Day, beer has no fiber – probably because it isn’t “barley water.” The average 12-ounce bottle of beer contains about 1/3 ounce of carbohydrates, all of it sugar. Oh, well, he probably made a few cents off this stupidity with D2C's penny-per-hit model (before it went away) – and more’s the pity.
   

¹ This website is now defunct, but you can see the post using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   dailytwocents.com/benefits-of-drinking-beer/
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