Health Benefits of Beer Essay

My topic that I chose for this lit review is beer. I decided to do beer because it is something that me and my dad have in common and can bond over. Beer is not just an alcoholic drink for me there is more substance there. Beer is interesting because every beer company makes their product differently. Also beer is one of the most sold products in the world and I would like to find more information of it. Humanities: Miller, Carl. â€Å"Beer and Television: Perfectly Tuned In. † All About Beer 25 Feb. 2008: 29. The source Beer and Television: Perfectly Tuned In would fall under the category of Social Sciences. It would fall under this category because the article is about beer commercials and how it affects business. There is really only one way to judge a beer commercial and that is is if the commercial makes consumers buy the product. Every commercial is a little different but every one of them has the same message, buy my beer. The article discusses the way the beer industry grew due to television. Every beer company realized they needed to make their product well known so that people would go out and buy it. These companies did this by creating short and sometimes funny commercials. The search for the perfect beer commercial has been around since the invention of the television in American culture in the 1940’s. In the 1940’s no one knew what a good commercial was because the television had just been made. Since the prohibition era had just ended beer breweries were wary of putting their product on the air at first. Some critics thought that this type of commercial intruded peoples’ living rooms and thought it offended people. For this reason the breweries only aired the commercials late at night and never on Sunday. The American bar was the first home of the television. In Chicago half of all television sales were bars. Meaning that the beer companies could target their product directly to the beer drinker in a bar stool. In the early days of television, television was dominated by sports programs. This is great for selling beer because â€Å"sports sell beers†. The article does a wonderful job of showing how the beer industry grew immensely due to television commercials. I like how many industries used tough macho men to promote the light beer campaign. Also the catchy jingles and funny cartoon skits would get stuck in your head so that when you went to the bar or to the alcohol store they would buy that product. The article used easy words so that the common man would be able to understand and reflect upon it. The article shows how competitive the beer industry was for the best commercial, giving the reader a descriptive past of beer. This article is linked to my topic because it shows how competitive the beer industry was with selling their beer. Mennella JA; Beauchamp GK Developmental Psychobiology [Dev Psychobiol] 1993 Dec; Vol. 26 (8), pp. 459-66. Beer, breast feeding, and folklore. It is common practice in our society to breast feed. It is believed in folklore that if the woman breast feeding drinks beer, than the baby will become healthier. Some other folklore is that if the woman drinks beer it will increase her milk supply, lessen the feeding pain, and it increases the hormone needed to create breast milk. So a group of scientists decided to have an experiment to see if drinking a beer really did do all the legend said it did. They had 12 lactating women with infants participate in the experiment. Six of whom drank an alcoholic beer before feeding and the other six drank a non-alcoholic beer. Then a week later at the same time as the week before the roles was reversed. What the experiment found was that: the infants drank less milk when the mother had the alcoholic beer, drank for longer, the women felt they had leftover milk in their breast, and the babies acted the same with both milks. Scientists would have liked to keep researching but, prolonged exposure to babies less than one year of age can cause ill effects to the their motor development skills. This article was interesting since there were so many myths about alcohol and breastfeeding. The article gave the reader many statistics about breastfeeding and how slight differences can change the milk. The article disqualifies all of the folklore of drinking a beer before breastfeeding. I hope women read this and realize that giving their babies low doses of beer can hurt their growth and will actually decrease the amount of milk the infant will drink. This article is linked to my topic because many women drink a beer before breastfeeding because they believe in the folklore. Social Sciences: Bretting, Sandra. â€Å"SMALL BUSINESS THE FLOW OF BEER. † Houston Chronicle ISSN 1074-7109, 11/08/2009, p. 4. The source SMALL BUSINESS THE FLOW OF BEER Keeping the kegs on course Logistics company tracks empties and gets them back fast for refills would fall under the category of social sciences. It would fall under this category because the article is about how a small business handles there kegs. Many people buy kegs for multiple reasons. One reason is that you can buy 170 or so beers for much cheaper than buying them by the 30 pack. Also is it refillable and there for saving the environment by not using cans or bottles to drink the beer. Every company though has to be able to track their kegs and get them refilled as soon as possible. Whenever a beer keg becomes empty it has to go back to the brewery to be refilled. So the beer stores would collect their kegs and send them back to the brewery which was usually in Europe. But since most beer stores handled around 90 products this made the logistics overwhelming. So a man named Brady 25 years ago created a freight company that transported products by rail. A few years later Guinness & Co. of Ireland hired Brady to handle their logistics for returning their empty kegs. After that deal the company took off. The company officially launched its beer logistics product in 1994. The product was called Kegspeditor Sytem, the system collects empty kegs from beer stores, returns kegs to the brewery, and then documents the entire process. The article does a good job of showing how one small company came up with an idea and made millions. I like how the article gave an exact description of what the company does. Also the writer makes the reader feel good about the company because it helps the common beer drinking man and the brewery and the environment. The article is a bit of a tough read since it is about logistics but, still interesting. The article shows that there are many things that happen with a keg that most people do not realize. This article is linked to my topic because beer kegs are a big part of the business aspect of beer. Kirkby, Diane Journal of Popular Culture; Fall2003, Vol. 37 Issue 2, p244-256 â€Å"Beer, Glorious Beer†: Gender Politics and Australian Popular Culture. â€Å"Beer is a religion in Australia,† according to Cyril Pearl. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s there were multiple myths about Australians’ and their beer. One myth was that their beer was the strongest in the world and was meant for tough men with chest hair. The second myth was that they could drink the most amount of beer. There is a very strong relationship between masculinity and beer. In fact in the 1920’s to around the 1960’s women had no correlation with beer besides serving it in Australia’s society. So during that time period the men would get off work at five and then drink till 6 at the bar, because that is when it closed back in the day. This closing time for bars was known as the â€Å"Six O’Clock Swill† where the working men of Australia would get hammered in one hour. Getting drunk every night was considered the good life in this culture, consequently during this time period there was the highest amount of divorces. This article does a fine job of explaining the history of Australian drinking culture and how it changed through the years. The reader learns that drinking was and still is a big deal in Australia. Also, this reading made me realize that Australian men may be fierce with their drinking but, in the more recent decades women have become just as fierce. The article uses some different dialect terms at times so that made the article a little hard to read. This article is linked to my topic because it is about how beer affected and affects Australian culture. Natural and Physical Sciences: LESKOSEK-CUKALOVIC et al. : Beer with Improved Functionality, Food Technol. Biotechnol. 48 (3) 384–391 (2010). New Type of Beer – Beer with Improved Functionality and Defined Pharmacodynamic Properties. Almost everyone enjoys an ice cold beer at the end of a hard day. Beer is the most popular beverage in the world. There are many reasons explaining why it is so popular. One reason is that it is a cheap alcoholic drink. Another is that there are so many different choices in choosing a beer. Thirdly, recently found out in fact that beer has health benefits. In healthy dosages beer is very good for you. Some health benefits include: reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, blood cholesterol levels, diabetes, osteoporosis, dementia, and a beer day is better for your heart than a glass of red wine. Beer however does have disastrous effects on your body if you consume excess amounts of it for a prolonged period of time. Good news though is in recent studies beer has the ability to lessen the chance of getting colon cancer. The most important biological factor found in the beer’s hops is the compound xanthohumol (XH). XH has the ability to stop major enzymes in cancer, particularly colon in moderate drinking. This article was extremely interesting in how it gave a beer a good name. It seems like many people are against beer because it turns gentlemen into cavemen. But, if those people would read this article their eyes would be opened to what beer really is, an alcoholic drink that is actually good for you in moderation. The best information in the article in my opinion was the fact that a beer a day is better for your heart than a glass of red wine. Article was extremely factual and had many statistics. This article is linked to my topic because it shows the positive effects beer can have on the body. J. D. Pedrera-Zamorano et al. / Nutrition 25 (2009) 1057–1063 Effect of beer drinking on ultrasound bone mass in women. Osteoporosis is a major health care issue. This disease is the weakening of bone mass causing more broken bones. Good news is that medicine has increased the life expectancy of the average woman. But, with more age comes more likelihood to get a disease especially one associated with age, such as osteoporosis. Women post menopause are the most likely to get osteoporosis. The older one gets the more calcitonin they lose. Calcitonin is one of the major attributes that keep your bones healthy. Recent studies have shown that moderate drinking increases calcitonin output. Also, in beer that does good for a woman’s body is flavones, it slows the post menopause effect of losing calcitonin. Another attribute of beer that helps prevent the deterioration of bones is silicon in liquid form. Since beer is second to water in providing silicon in liquid form to the western hemisphere’s diet, one could say that beer could help promote bone formation. I found this article very intriguing because of the health benefits, especially for women. Most women do not enjoy drinking beer because of the taste, but maybe after reading this article they will change their minds. The reading had many facts, large words, and stats. This article yet again gives beer a good name in how it can help people. This article is linked to my topic because it shows how the beer can help prolong the life of women.