Historians
submit that human beings have been around for about 100,000 years, and informed
that in the first 90,000 years, the world achieved absolutely nothing at all.
Then Beer came; and then put an end to primitivism and kick-started the age of
creativity and invention.
That
Beer happened, and changed the world forever sounds almost too bizarre to be
true, but many anthropologists and archaeologists now believe that it was a
taste for beer, not bread, that prompted people to start farming barley in
around 9000BC.
Known
as the agricultural revolution, “beering” actually ended hunter-gathering and
led to the world's first ever civilisation - Mesopotamia. The drive to grow
more barley in order to make more beer, led to a cascade of inventions. The
plough, the wheel, irrigation, mathematics and even writing, all of these
world-changing innovations were dreamed up to help with the production and
distribution of beer.
As
Egypt took over from Mesopotamia, in the Land of the Pharaohs beer was the
national currency, a dietary staple and even an important medicine. Even in
more recent times, beer's hidden hand has been behind some of history's most
remarkable breakthroughs, from the discovery of germ theory and modern
medicine, to the invention of refrigeration, the birth of the factory and the
end of child labour. Beer didn't just change the world, historians claim it saved it!
To
quote historian Gregg Smith: “Beer changed the course of human history. Not once, not twice, but over and over again.”
It
wasn’t just the Sumerians and Mesopotamians who enjoyed the odd glass of
cerveza. The Egyptians were also big
boozers. Ra wasn’t just the God of life and love, but beer too – a pretty neat
combination.
The
labourers who built the pyramid of Giza received seven pints of beer a day in
payment, making the total bill for that job, 1,489,199,995 pints. For the Egyptians it was not just a form of
currency but a staple food (school boys would drink a bowl for breakfast
producing, I guess, a different kind of Ready Brek glow) and beer was also used
to treat illnesses.
In the
last few years researchers found the presence of the antibiotic tetracycline
(which was only ‘discovered’ in 1948) in the bones of Egyptian mummies. After some more research they found the only
place this could have come from was the beer drunk at the time. In fact fast
forward a few thousand years and beer was the basis of modern medicine too.
By the
16th Century, the average annual consumption of beer in Britain was 530 pints
for every man, woman and child – three times the amount we drink today. Monks were the original master brewers and
the church became rich on the back of their skill then as entrepreneurs took
over, beer spearheaded the creation of trade, commerce, banking and finance
Beer’s
influence on technology continued unabated into the 20th Century. It gave us
refrigeration after the brewing industry financed research into the process to
keep lager chilled and it revolutionised industry when Michael Owens built the
first automated production line to make beer bottles in 1904 – some 10 years
before Henry Ford took the credit with his cars (as Ford said: “History is
bunk’).
Beer
gets a bad press, owning to many misconceptions. It’s regularly blamed for many
of society’s ills but the reality is that society as we know it is, in large
part at least, only here because of it.
So, next time anyone tells you how evil beer is, remind them that some
of the best ideas come when you drink.
Today, there are about forty thousand
types of beer in the world in an industry that employs millions of people
directly and indirectly. However, the world of beer is still shrouded in many myths and
misconceptions. Some of these are easy to contemplate, while others, downright
ridiculous.
Beer is an alcoholic beverage that
carries a lot of benefits and myths. Interestingly, scientists have found that
moderate drinkers who drink regularly but only in small amounts had lower body
weights than their non-drinking peers and those who drank a lot at once.
There are at least two ways in which an alcoholic beverage such as beer
might impact beneficially on the body:
First, through a
direct physiological impact on bodily tissues and functions; Second,
through indirect impact, but founded equally on a physiological interaction
All the benefits of beer are however, functions of moderate consumption. Scientists and Nutritionists
have submitted that moderation level of beer consumption is beneficial to cardiovascular health. Dr.
Henk Hendricks, a biologist and a
project leader in the Institute for Food and Nutrition in The
Netherlands, explained at a Beer and Lifestyle symposium in Lagos last Tuesday.
He explained that virtually all processes contributing to
Cardio Vascular Diseases, CVD are beneficially effected. These effects, he
said, substantiate the causal relation
between moderate alcohol consumption and CVD .These effects, according to
him, have been observed in all groups
studied (young – old, men – women)
According to Hendricks, some of the
inherent advantages of beer include: Low percentage of alcohol; large
quantities of water; its role in rehydration;
a good source of minerals; a good source of polyphenolic
antioxidants; contains anti-inflammatory
xanthohumoles; and a large variety of raw materials, including gluten-free'
Rich in fibers.
No comments:
Post a Comment