health | Literature and Libation

(Warning, this post contains some dietary SCIENCE! I’ll also note that I’m not a doctor or a scientist, so any doctors or scientists who read this can feel free to correct me and I’ll update accordingly)

There’s a lot of buzz in the beer industry about India Pale Ale (IPA) reaching critical mass in terms of market share, and a quick glace at any US beer store might betray a prophecy coming true. But despite an overwhelming selection, the data and money follow the hops, and for the time being, America can’t get enough humulus lupulus.

The legacy of lager rumbles in the background like a storm on the horizon, while sour beers pop up in a perfectly mowed IPA lawn like defiant dandelions. The winds are changing slowly, subtly. If I had to bet, I’d put my money on a trend shift away from IPAs, and my guess is that the move won’t be entirely grounded in consumer burnout or “lupulin threshold shift,” but partly fueled by consumer health.

Let’s make no pretenses: as much as we love it, beer is not a health food. The contemporary spike in beer appreciation means a lot more people are putting a lot more beer into their systems, which will, at some point or another, manifest as slight (to severe) medical complications. By graduating from pale adjunct lager to IPA, we’re ingesting record numbers of hops and their constituent chemical parts, the impacts of which have yet to be realized (but no, for the millionth time, you won’t grow man-boobs).

Alpha Acids

The metric used to measure a hop in brewing is alpha acid. Typically listed as a percentage by weight, this term as Stan Hieronymus defines it in For the Love of Hops, “in fact refers to to multiple acids that are similar in structure but significantly different.” The three that matter most to beer are humulone, cohumulone, and adhumulone, which, when isomerized in a brewing boil, become the six iso-alpha acids that give us that desired bitterness.

The amount of acids extracted during the boil is reliant on the pH of the mash and wort, but IPAs tend to have significantly more parts per millions than other styles:

“Commonly, these iso-alpha acids are found in beer at levels from a staggeringly low value of 1.6ppm (Michelob Ultra) to over 40ppm (Ruination IPA)” -Beer Sensory Science

TL;DR – IPAs, by nature of being an aggressively hopped style, contain more iso-alpha acids.

A few months ago, a former coworker and brother-in-writing-arms sent me what I thought was an innocuous message over Gmail chat:

“I’m telling you, since I quit drinking IPAs, no more heartburn.”

I dismissed his comment as a personal gastrointestinal discovery, thinking maybe the rest of his diet was contributing to his over-achieving acid production. But the thought stuck with me, festered as if it were indigestion itself, until one night a few weeks ago, when I drank a Bell’s Two-Hearted IPA.

Heartburn after about half a beer. For the medical record, as to not appear to be falsely attributing causes, I’m an athletic, water drinking, veggie eating young man, with no predisposition to acid reflux in my genetic history.

I’ve had plenty of Two-Hearted in the past, love the beer, and never had an averse reaction to drinking it. But recently, any IPA over ~50 IBUs sets me off, and if I dare drink more than a couple in an evening, I wake up feeling like I used my esophagus to put out a campfire.

Time to dig deeper, said my brain. Time to drink more water, said the rest of my body.

Beer pH and You

A normal human body has an overall pH that hovers around a very slightly alkaline ~7.4 (remember from Chem 101: the logarithmic scale is 0 to 14, acid to alkaline). Beer’s pH varies by style, but is always acidic (~3.1-~4.5). For reference, black coffee tends to have a pH of ~5, while soda pop sits around ~3. That’s a lot of liquefied acid.

Basic logic and chemistry means that when we drink beer, we’re adding an acidic solution to an alkaline environment, which, after diffusion, will bring down the alkaline levels of the body in turn. This is normal; hell, our stomach is filled with 1.5-3 pH hydrochloric acid, but the deeply alkaline environment of our bones and muscular system help balance everything out.

Homeostasis is amazing.

The problem appears when consistently introducing acidic solutions to a body trying to remain neutral. While its pH remains similar to other styles, IPAs tend to have more additional acids in suspension waiting to be processed by your body, meaning the style contributes even more acid increasing compounds on top of an already acidic drink. While all beer will eventually lower you body pH, (in theory) IPA will do it faster, and with more gusto!

Eventually, if chronic enough, a low body pH leads to a condition called acidosis. This condition can cause serious respiratory and nervous system issues, but is also one of the main causes of acid reflux and GERD. Combine IPAs with other acidic or acid-promoting foods (like those found in large majority of American diets), and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty miserable existence where popping Prilosec like Larry the Cable guy becomes a morning ritual.

Alcohol, too

Brewing an good IPA is a beautiful tango between sweetness and bitterness, between malt and hops. As the amount of hops in a recipe rises, the brewer needs to use more malt to retain a semblance of balance. More malt means more sugar, more sugar means more alcohol. It’s the reason a lot of modern IPAs clock in around ~7% or higher, and why a lot of people (like me) think session IPAs lack body and taste like hop water (not enough malt for the amount of hops).

Alcohol inhibits your kidneys’s ability to regulate phosphate ions against mineral ions, which helps balance body pH. Mixed with a physical increase in the amount of acid in your system, you’re looking at a spike in acidity that your body can’t effectively control. If you consume hoppy beer daily, your body never has a chance to reestablish a neutral base, increasing your chances of developing acidosis and its sundry symptoms.

RIP IPA

What does this mean for the future of our beloved hop-bombs? Young, healthy people tend to process alcohol and acid quickly and efficiently. But as the “craft” beer market ages, and the average drinker’s body is not as able to process additional acidity as effectively, we may see beer drinkers move onto styles that contain fewer suspended iso-alpha acids, or at the very least, significantly curtail their consumption of IPAs. Ultimately, the trend may shift not because of taste, but as consumers are forced to consider the detrimental effects of too much beer, or vis a vis, too much acid in their diet.

The solution to the potential IPA-to-acidosis problem seems obvious, I’m sure: moderation plus a healthy diet. But some of the underlying hedonism of being into beer juxtaposes “just having one,” as evidenced by the World Health Organization’s survey noting that the average American drinks 778 drinks per year (or ~2 every day). Beer enthusiasts (myself included) are probably guilty of even more than that, on occasion (thanks a lot, SAVOR).

While moderation is the ideal, those with IPA-laden habits are not likely to break them. Not unless they have to for some major reason.

Like, oh I don’t know, their health?

(Obviously this post contains a lot of conjecture. I just wanted to probe potential health issues related to pH, so don’t take any of it as gospel, please. I should also note that there are some fringe health benefits to some of the alpha acids in hops, but most of those come from ingesting small amounts, and are probably lost when talking excessive drinking.)

The wizards are often testing my limits. They have me do things that seem unreasonable given the still somewhat fragile state of my arm. I am often coerced into doing things like lifting heavy objects, applying weights to appendages for various lengths of time, and sometime even squeezing things as hard as I can.

My right, uninjured arm, can squeeze things pretty well. I average about ~130 lbs of pressure, which is in the “excellent” category when compared to national averages. My left, broken-ass arm, averages ~100 lbs of pressure, which falls into the “average” category. I was shocked when the wizards told me that most of their patients score in the 50 lb range, even with their dominant hand.

I am not herculean by any means. I’m barely 145 lbs, and have trouble reaching on top of things taller than 6 feet. I am fast and agile, but I have never really considered myself strong, especially in comparison to the projected societal image of strong. My injury has only exacerbated this idea, to the point where I was actively feeling lame, not being able to lift items I could before the break, and feeling uselessly dejected about being a noodle-armed weakling.

It was quite a shock for me to hear that I was quite the opposite, even in my damaged state. It took some time to digest, until I started to embrace the idea that maybe all those hours of working out did yield something tangible. I also began to realize that if I could be of above average strength and fitness at one of my lowest physical moments, the average American must be a pathetic sack of loosely contained goo.

I have discussed the idea (with very reputable, awesome people) that the entire nation, nay modern world, is a mere shell of what humanity once was. Gorillas, pound for pound one of the strongest animal on the planet, are 6x stronger than the strongest human. Their DNA matches 95-99% of ours, and yet they dwarf us in practical strength. I find it hard to believe that a species one genus away would retain its natural impressive power while we remained spongy and sinewy.

The argument is that as we developed more sophisticated brains, the necessity for raw physical power declined. Tools did the work of hands but faster, with less effort and injury while weapons and traps relieved the need to chase down and manually kill prey. This is all logically sound, if you ignore the fact that it took tens of millenia to reach the aforementioned levels of civilization.

In the early times of man, humans still had to survive in a harsh, untamed world. Even with steady technological and mental progress they were exposed to the elements, had to compete for food and resources with other, often bigger animals, and work hard to stave off extinction. Daily life didn’t evolve from old raw meat in a cave to an E-Class in Suburbia in a few thousand years.

So why then, are we so pathetically scrawny now? Why can a dude who spends most of his life in a drab three-walled pseudo-cage score dramatically above average on a simple strength test? Surely, countless years of development would yield superior specimens of both mental and physical prowess throughout the world, no?

No. But not because of anything natural. I blame the very thing that others do, but for very different reasons. It was technology and progress that weakened us as a race, but not because we didn’t need to be strong anymore. We were affected by the poisons of industry, the lethargy of convenience, and the decadence of materialism.

I once wrote a piece (full of ideas, but unfinished, like my writing career) about simplicity in early America. Complex tax forms didn’t exist, managing a credit score would sound like a motif from a weird fiction novel, and having to maintain your home, car, relationships, jobs, creeping psychosis, and finances were either nonexistent or generally a non-issue. The things that mattered were integral to survival; eating, establishing proper shelter, keeping the wilds at bay with a pointed stick that made thunder.

When life is about surviving, you are forced to be strong. Your mental fortitude directly relates how well you live, and how well you support your family, while your physical strength dictates if you’ll live or if wolves will eat your family. It was clear cut and gave people very few options – “be strong or die” said the Earth, and humans obliged.

But we, as Americans, have redefined survival. No longer are we concerned with badgers sneaking into the larders, or that the nearest city state might burst into violent revolt and march angrily into our cozy huts, instead we worry about qualifying for loans, impressing people who have not shown any reason to be worth impressing, and displaying our worth outwardly with things instead of ideas. We fret about gas prices, billable hours, and myriad stressful constructs of modern society.

Our stress is almost completely manufactured. Shelter and food are a given in the First World, but humans need to feel they are challenged, so they make challenges for themselves. The complexity of modern life has layered on new, abstract aspects of survival that are extremely detached from basic instincts. You know to eat when you’re hungry or run when in danger, but managing finances and building a career are alien concepts.

Ultimately, the majority of our energy is expended dealing with the everyday balancing act, leaving our bodies and minds worse from the experience. Industry has turned our food into unhealthy gruel, adding chemicals, preservatives, and other unnatural aspects to things in the name of speed and cost. Physical activity, no longer necessary to survive, has become a fad; reserved for those who “care about their image” rather than regarded as a necessity for healthy life.

Unfortunately, as more and more technology comes along to remove any physical labor or mental engagement, the problem will get worse. There is little people can do to fight it, as even the vocal minority can’t convince the silent majority that a green, naturalistic movement could solve a lot of the worlds problems. I fear the humans had their moment of glory thousands of years before I wrote these words.

I used to honestly believe the pyramids were built by extraterrestrials. While I still believe there has to be other life out there in the great cosmic expanse, a change in philosophy has made me more open to the idea that humans did in fact build these amazing structures. I don’t agree that today’s humans could build them; we are frail, excuse driven, and lazy. But perhaps humans closer to our original genetic make up could have. Perhaps one ancient Egyptian laborer was as strong as a gorilla and as quick minded as Hugh Laurie. Perhaps the average person 5000 years ago was as good as our elite few today. Perhaps they were in many ways more advanced than we are, but from a completely different perspective than how it is normally viewed. Perhaps it isn’t technology that makes us more advanced and superior, but in fact the exact opposite.

We’re told that technology and understanding of the world has made it a better place, but I think there is room to argue that point. Somewhere in the evolution of man, we’ve lost some intrinsic strength and intelligence, that we will probably never see again. We have many things that make life much, much easier, yes; but maybe life isn’t supposed to be easy.

Or maybe I’m rambling.

He has kitteh.

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