Biomedical researchers are a bunch of wine snobs. There, I said it.

PubMed has nearly 4,000 studies containing the word “beer” in their title or abstract (not counting those that invoke the Beer-Lambert law, which relates the absorption of light to the properties of the material it is traveling through). Most of these relate to alcoholism, including a psychological experiment involving a simulated game of beer pong. Even a Japanese case study of a man overly fond of sake classified his pathology as “beer potomania” rather than “rice wine potomania”. Branding is everything, and, among scientists, beer has a bad rap.

Meanwhile, after reading the literature on the health benefits of wine, I’m surprised most pharmacies don’t have a sommelier on call. The compounds found in wine are cure-alls, whether they’re protecting rats from the oxidative stress of diabetes, reducing the risk of coronary heart disease, or not giving you cancer. Norwegian scientists even found that drinking wine improves cognition.

Beer, on the other hand, apparently puts you at risk for malaria and rectal tumors. Most recently it has been linked to psoriasis.

Where are the scientists willing to stand up for the mother-beverage? There is some hope to be found in a letter to Emergency Medicine Australasia, where the authors relate the case of a 65-year-old man who suffered burns across 40% of his body after falling into a garden fire. Believing the hospital to be closed, he sat at home and drank two liters of beer, which turned out to be effective in both staving off dehydration and supplying him with electrolytes. In some parts of the world, the authors write, beer could be a better rehydration method rather than potentially contaminated local water.

Cheers to that!

Image by jenny downing via Flickr Creative Commons