Wednesday, January 8, 2014

It's official, beer drinkers eat a lot of junk food. We tried to hide it behind the mountain of carrots and apples, but science has found us out. This is according to an article in the September 2013 edition of the European Journal of Preventing Cardiology. This issue was way better than the August edition. Researchers in France tracked the spending habits of shoppers at the supermarket chain Casino. Ever wonder what happens to your loyalty points data? It could be used for science. After sorting through almost 200,000 till receipts, they found some interesting facts:
  • Moderate alcohol drinkers display more favourable socioeconomic status.
  • 71% of French shoppers drank wine, compared to 14% who drank beer.
  • Whisky drinkers spent the most of their food budget on alcohol (10.1%) compared to beer drinkers (4.9%). Beer drinkers spent the lowest.
  • Wine buyers bought more healthy foods than anyone else. Especially those that bought Bordeaux. Yes, the researchers split the variety of wine purchases into different categories; it was France after all.
  • Beer drinkers bought the lowest amounts of healthy foods.
  • Sadly, people overall spend more on unhealthy foods than healthy foods.
Healthy foods included tea, margarine, fish, fruits, veggies, white meat and low-fat dairy products. Unhealthy foods were described as processed, added sugar, cheese, salt, butter, biscuits and high-fat dairy. The French Paradox of health was thought to be due to the consumption of red wine. This article casts doubt on this fact as healthy food choices were different with those who drink wine. I have a few complaints about this article. The craft beer movement is a little lagging in France. Would this data be comparable to grocery till receipts obtained from Whole Foods, Safeway or Haggens? To make matters worse, beer drinkers also spent the most on soft drinks compared to other shoppers. This is not surprising, soda pop is similar in flavour to Bud and Kronenbourg 1664.

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