Beer: It isn't the alcohol, it's the opoids

When I was younger, I do remember feeling quite odd after a large breakfast at a pancake place. I didn't know at the time that gliadin acts as an opoid.

Of course, if you stay Paleo most of the time, when you do go off the reservation, you notice.

I bought some local craft beer, which I suppose was good as it could be, being beer. There is something irredeemably flat about beer, regardless of how frothy it may be. It is like buying a bland, thirst increasing, milkshake, except without the satisfaction of ice cream.

And the first thing I noticed was the opiods. Not an alcohol buzz, but the little kid sister to loratab. Generally speaking this is not a class of drugs that I am looking for. Loratab makes me rather grumpy. I think it is because of being an introvert and the dominance of the acetylcholine pathway.

But opoids make a lot of people happy. The social dopamine chasers like it.

The interesting things about these sorts of brews is that the fermentation doesn't just produce alcohol, but the presence of these various compounds- and there are many more than just gliadin, like phyto-estrogens in hops- tend to make the resulting brew more potent. It isn't the alcohol, but the combination of these various things, and the fact that the yeasts respond to these various things as well. The 'traditional' version of poly-pharmacy.

Then there are the gut damaging effects...

I suspect it would be better for the masses to drink wine, assuming they could develop their palates to the point where they didn't need it to taste like soda.

But I reminded of the reality that the rich always eat meat, though they often either encourage or force the poor to subsist on a vegan/vegetarian diet.