July 4 BBQ: a Beer Belly can be good. Enjoy some brewskis with your brats.
Drink beer to gain more diversity in your gut bugs
Planning on grilling bratwursts for the holiday gathering? Well, don’t forget to throw it in beer. Parboil with onions, then grill to crisp up the skin. Yummm.
It’s good for your health! Yep, it helps the good gut bugs to grow. A study of men who drank beer for a month measured their gut microbiota before and after. Diversity of bugs increased ( a good thing) for both groups [with and without the alcohol content.].
It was a parallel, randomized trial design—with two separate groups of participants. In this double-blind study, 19 healthy men were randomly divided into two groups who drank 11 fluid ounces of either alcoholic or non-alcoholic lager with dinner for 4 weeks.
Gut microbiota modulation might constitute a mechanism mediating the effects of beer on health. In this randomized, double-blinded, two-arm parallel trial, 22 healthy men were recruited to drink 330 mL of nonalcoholic beer (0.0% v/v) or alcoholic beer (5.2% v/v) daily during a 4-week follow-up period. Blood and faecal samples were collected before and after the intervention period. Gut microbiota was analyzed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Drinking nonalcoholic or alcoholic beer daily for 4 weeks did not increase body weight and body fat mass and did not change significantly serum cardiometabolic biomarkers. Nonalcoholic and alcoholic beer increased gut microbiota diversity which has been associated with positive health outcomes and tended to increase faecal alkaline phosphatase activity, a marker of intestinal barrier function. These results suggest the effects of beer on gut microbiota modulation are independent of alcohol and may be mediated by beer polyphenols.
Beer Breasts for your brats?
And for the milk maids out there [those gals producing the milk for their lil ones] my grandma’s words of wisdom advised us to guzzle the Guinness if we wanted it to flow. Personal anecdotes seem to confirm her advice, but the mechanism is not quite known. There are studies that suggest consuming beer may increase levels of prolactin, the hormone that makes milk. It may actually be the barley in beer that causes that prolactin to rise.
Guinness, one of the big British breweries, specializes in a stout that is made with barley malt and barley grain. The added barley makes the stout “silkier” and “thicker” due to beta-glucan, the viscous polysaccharide (long-chained sugar molecule) in barley that increases prolactin. It makes sense that Guinness is the commercial beer most frequently recommended today for breastfeeding mothers, as it is one of the very few to still contain good amounts of beta-glucan.
Beginning in the early 1500s, German law limited the ingredients to barley, hops, yeast, and water. Reasons for this went beyond taste preferences. By prohibiting the use of wheat, more wheat was available to bake bread. By restricting the allowed ingredients, various other types of beer were pushed into obscurity and could no longer compete with the large breweries. The law effectively got rid of international competition as it formed a protective barrier to the importation of any foreign beer that used other ingredients. These restrictions would eventually influence the international production of beer, as brewers in neighboring countries conformed to the restrictions so that they could compete within the large German market.
Luckily for breastfeeding mothers, the “pure” ingredients defined by German-type beer, barley, malt, hops, and yeast, are intensely lactogenic. This is why classical European beer is recognized by breastfeeding mothers as the best beer-type galactagogue- Hilary Jacobson
So our Grandmas were right! They usually are. And our best BBQ recipes come from them too.
However you do choose to celebrate the Fourth, just be sure you do enjoy yourselves!
REFERENCES
BBQ Brats 'n Beer https://www.food.com/recipe/bbq-brats-n-beer-11527
C Marques, et al. Impact of Beer and Nonalcoholic Beer Consumption on the Gut Microbiota: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Controlled Trial, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.2c00587
The Use of Beer as a Galactagogue, historically and today by Hilary Jacobson | Oct 1, 2020 https://hilaryjacobson.com/uncategorized/beer-breastfeeding-historically-and-today/
Prior BioMedWorks newsletters discussing microbiome:
biomedworks.substack.com/p/starving-those-pathogens-in-the-battle
biomedworks.substack.com/p/in-the-spring-at-the-end-of-the-day
This is my kind of research.