Dieting with Beer?

With growing frequency, this time of year all kinds of articles and pieces are coming out regarding the beer diet, or people modifying their Lenten dietary needs to replicate those of 15th and 16th century monks.  At first blush, it seems like a really awesome endeavor.  I mean drinking nothing but beer and water for 40 days?  YES!!  I decided that I could weigh in on the topic, hopefully providing a bit of sobering reality.

If you Google "Beer diet for Lent", you will find literally thousands of articles, videos, how-tos on achieving this lofty supposedly pious goal.  I think it bears stating that the world in 2012 could not, and should not even attempt to replicate this.  Why you ask?  For starters, the beer itself is vastly different.  Even consuming the trappist dubbels and tripels still made at the abbeys and monastaries, you are getting something really different than the same yeast, malt, hops, and water than was available 500 years ago.  In several of the videos, the dieters were drinking Miller Lite or Coors, and think that all beer is created equal.  Few things are further from the truth.

Even with the differences in the product, we do not consume the same amount of beer that people did during the Middle Ages, even during college and outside of Lent.  In fact, studies have shown, that the average person drank 60 times more than citizens do today.  The primary reason for this was a lack of quality, safe drinking water.  They also did not have super yeast strains that fermented the malt out to 18% ABV.  The typical table ales and beers were generally 3-4%ABV, and designed to have enough alcohol to kill bacteria, but not brain cells.  Like anything else, you can build up a tolerance to things, and beer was no different.  So, when the monks that were actually doing the brewing went to fast, they were not cutting out food that they had become accustomed to AND introducing an inebriating amount of booze.  It was a much gentler shift in their dietary habits.  The yeast produced today is some of the most highly flocctuating stuff on the planet, and the end product can sometimes melt your face. 

All this aside, probably the single most important reason most health professionals discourage this diet, is because the average American's diet is terrible to begin with, and the overwhelming majority of people maintain a sedentary lifestyle.  Working in front of a computer is nowhere close to rising with the sun and working in the field all day.  Just one weekend of working in a garden is enough to put most into serious pain.  Combining a poor diet, lack of exercise, and adding only beer to fuel the body, it is difficult to think of a worse idea than that.

I personally do not believe that God intended us to give things up for only 40 days a year to get closer to Him, but rather we remember always the goodness and mercy bestowed upon us.  It is foolish to think that 40 days of inebriation could draw anyone closer to anything other than the porcelin throne.