Beer the most widely consumed fermented beverage in the world.  Let me repeat: The most widely consumed fermented beverage in the WORLD.  And when you come from a functional medicine perspective, the word fermented is like gold.  Fermented foods and beverages have been around as a method of preservation for food since before refrigeration and using bacteria and yeast to turn food into probiotic powerhouses makes them healthy for us.  That probiotic content is something people pay big money for in the world of supplements because of the profound impact it has on the health of their gut microbiome, and in turn, many disease processes like Crohn’s disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, anxiety disorders, and even obesity. 

Beer is simple, but the art is in crafting something tasty out of essentially water, starch, brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), and hops.

{Side note: The starch listed above is where the grains come in.  Glutinous grains are traditionally used and trying to accomplish the same outcome with gluten-free options is a very difficult task. Tip your hat to your local brewers if they’re able to make your gluten-free beer dreams come true, because it is a next-level art.}

And here we are, back at the table, talking about how we have more bacteria in our gut than cells in our body and the health and diversity of those communities of bacteria are how we stay healthy as a human species.  Undeniable at this point, but where does beer fit in?  It’s a fermented beverage and tons of people drink beer, but many of them are NOT healthy.  Does it have a place in this conversation?  What parts of beer are the healthiest?  Does beer really help breastfeeding and hormones?  Did you know they’re even talking about this in the cancer world?  Isn’t alcohol unhealthy?  Are there better beers to choose than others from a health perspective? Can you overdo it….I’m asking for a friend.

If you’re a science geek, I’m going to make you cry by skipping over all the details and references because at the end of the day, it takes hours to cover all that, and if you’re like me, I really just want know I can trust the assessment and then give me the conclusion.  So, that’s where we’re at: my opinion based on the hours of going down the rabbit hole for fun.

There are 3 things to consider when talking about beer for health:

1. The influence on the microbiome
2. The method of production and consumption
3. The interaction with hormones

Is Alcohol Healthy?

No.  But there are interesting data around blue zones showing moderate consumption contributes to health and longevity.  So, it begs the question: Is it the type of alcohol or the way it’s consumed?  My opinion is that unpasteurized, fermented beverages like traditional wine, beer, and ciders are better for you than other options, in moderation, and consuming them WITH people complicates the benefit around what we know about community, conversation, friendship and the physiological and biochemical changes that come with that alone.  Red wine has been shown in studies to have the least detrimental impact on inducing leaky gut, and unfortunately, we can’t say the same for my spirit of choice: gin.

Nutshell: traditionally fermented options are best, in moderation, WITH friends

Now that we have the elephant out of the way, let’s have some beer…

What makes beer healthy?  {because I would love to tell my doctor}

I want to focus on one component of beer here: hops.  Hops are plants which contain compounds like polyphenols.  These may sound foreign, but it’s some of the same stuff you know about wine! Resveratrol is the polyphenol in wine that has gotten all the love over the years, boosting wine sales significantly after the research was published.  Hops have up to a 14% polyphenol concentration in the dried cones and while that encompasses phenolic acids, catechins and proanthocyanidins, I’m mostly obsessed with the flavonoids. 

{If you ever read my article on UTI’s, then you know it’s the proanthocyanidin content (PAC) in cranberries that work some magic on E.coli. Read here.}

In terms of flavonoids in hops, xanthohumol is where it’s at.  It contributes to the bitterness in taste but it is probably more important that when that compound hits your gut, your microbiome takes it and transforms it into a different compound.  Here’s the kicker, the genus responsible for this is Eubacterium.  This kind of bacteria is one of the largest butyrate producers in your gut, which for those that don’t know, butyrate is a short chain fatty acid that acts as fuel for your intestinal cells to thrive, keeping leaky gut at bay. You may have heard of them when talking about PREbiotics; the stuff that you get when you eat fibers to feed healthy bacteria in your gut.  Polyphenols do the same thing to some extent!  If you or your doctor have done a stool test on you, you may be more familiar with these bacteria being in the phylum of Firmicutes. 

{Side note for clinicians: If you see absent Firmicutes, you are not only likely seeing low diversity in your patient, low butyrate production, etc, but you are also seeing someone who may be deficient in their ability to benefit from polyphenols that require that bacteria to transform them into other compounds for a health outcome!  This area is something that I feel strongly about in terms of personalized and precision medicine in the future.  We are already studying the differences in drug metabolism based on someone’s age, sex, genes, and MICROBIOME, but we should be exploring the same principles to herbal medicinal interventions, too.  It does no good to provide someone a compound that they lack the ability to transform if transformation is necessary for the health outcome. Back to regular scheduled programming…}

They have done studies to watch the microbiome shifts using alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions of wine to try and determine where benefits are coming from, and sorry guys, they see more benefit in the microbiome shifts of people drinking polyphenol-rich beverages WITHOUT the alcohol. 

Nutshell: Wine and beer have these healthy polyphenols, but if you were trying to be perfectionistic, you’d prioritize non-alcoholic versions to have healthy impact on your microbiome. 

What are the best options to choose?

Prioritize the following:

• Craft beer may ensure more traditional methods of production
• Buying from smaller brewers locally, on tap, may improve the health aspects due to lack of pasteurization
• Consider choosing non-alcoholic hop beverages for all the polyphenol benefits without the alcohol down-sides
  • I’m not sponsored in any way, but I am obsessed with HopTea, which is a tea brewed with hops and carbonated to give you all the feels of a beer, without the hangover

Beer and hormones?

I didn’t even get the fact that hops are considered a galactogogue, which basically means, helps breastfeeding moms with milk production.  They are also a phytoestrogen, which means they have estrogenic influence.  Yes, estrogen is so important that even plants make them.  This is often used in menopausal women to retain hormone balance to help hot flashes and brain neurodegeneration.  

This could be an entirely different blog for an entirely different time.  For now, I just wanted to share what I was learning about hops and the microbiome as my obsession for research in autoimmunity and my love of HopTea grows.  Until next time!