Britain's bingeing on beer! Actually, it's not

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/23/beer-britain-liver-disease

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Whatever your views, it's a depressingly familiar story: we're drinking ourselves to death. And we seem to be doing it with evil, nasty beer.

The shocking rise in liver disease fatalities was everywhere yesterday, and even though the numbers made it very clear that this rise was due to a combination of obesity, alcohol and hepatitis, drink was the whipping boy. Very few news outlets mentioned the nation's burgeoning obesity epidemic, and chose instead to focus on booze, paving the way perfectly for today's announcement of a new minimum alcohol pricing strategy.

Let's gloss over the inconvenient truth that alcohol consumption is actually falling, because everyone does. If you follow binge drinking stories in the news, you may be surprised to learn that between 2005 and 2010 the number of men drinking more than the recommended 21 units a week fell from 31% to 26%, and the proportion of women drinking more than 14 units a week fell from 21% to 17%.

More frustrating if you enjoy a decent pint – or accurate news reporting – is that the news media seem convinced that the main driver of alcohol related liver disease is beer. A quick internet trawl yesterday revealed the Guardian, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Express, Metro, Sun, BBC, Nursing Times [paywall], Daily Telegraph, and Press Association all using images of beer – just beer – with this story. It's the same again today. This newspaper managed to find that a pic of that rare phenomenon, women drinking beer, to report the coalition's plan to introduce minimum alcohol pricing to curb binge drinking, and uses beer prices to illustrate the financial impact this will have on binge drinkers.

So it may come as a surprise that, if you look at the actual data, beer is not the problem at all. Figures from the British Beer and Pub Association reveal that over the same period as this rise in liver disease, beer sales plummeted by 18%. Within that, standard lager, typically 3.5-4.4% alcohol by volume (ABV) fell just 4%, while premium lager (around 5% ABV) was down 18% – so the strongest beers are falling fastest. Over the same period, sales of wine grew by 4%, and became significantly stronger in alcohol. And sales of spirits shot up by 18%.

So it's obvious that if there's any link between rising liver disease and alcohol, it's not beer that's causing it. People are trading up to higher ABV drinks, and beer sales are plummeting as liver disease rises. So why does the media blame beer?

Partly it's harried subeditors reaching for the first image they have of an alcoholic drink. In its vain efforts to secure any kind of positive stories about beer over the years (there's not a single British newspaper or magazine that carries regular beer coverage) the beer industry has sent in plenty of photos to keep on file. It's also the British disease of denigrating what we do well.

British brewing is revered around the world, and served in our pubs it's a magnet for tourists – 85% of visitors to Britain prefer the pub to bars in their own countries. We're in the middle of a craft ale boom, we make an artisanal, flavourful, nutritious, relatively low-alcohol product that makes £28bn for the British economy and supports 600,000 jobs. If you take the trouble to ask binge drinkers, like I did, they'll tell you they don't drink beer because it doesn't get them wasted quick enough. But beer's democracy, sociability and approachability mean that in a snobbish and self-loathing age, we dismiss it as "just beer", ignoring its virtues and blaming it for the bad news.

With 16 pubs closing every week, and spiralling beer duty (up more than 40% in four years) killing one of our last manufacturing industries, this kicking of beer has to stop. Can't we please start to take pride in something we do brilliantly, something that enhances millions of people's lives? And can we please start by illustrating stories about the negative effects of drinking with pictures of the drinks that actually cause the trouble?

Cheers.

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