What’s Good For You

The Guinness Brewing Company of Dublin, Ireland became famous by providing its customers with one thing they needed in addition to beer. That was INFORMATION. Conversation in bars often degenerated into arguments over facts, particularly facts concerning extremes – of such matters as speed, or altitude, or age. This of course was the origin of the Guinness Book of World Records, which became so popular throughout the world that the book itself was a record best-seller.

Guinness was already well-known all over Britain and had its own chain of pubs — so that, wherever you went, you could hardly avoid that name, which was often embodied in a slogan: “GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU.”

This raises some interesting questions: Is Guinness, or any beer, really good for you? And, for that matter – to open this article’s whole bag of worms – what, in this life, on this planet, really is, or is not, good for you, or for me, or for anybody?

Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle have been debating the concept of “The Good” for thousands of years, without perceivably making the world any better. So maybe we should start with some notion easier to grasp than Philosophy, such as Medicine. Medical practitioners of all kinds, past and present, have been telling us what and what not to put into our bodies to keep them healthy. 

But here, I’m afraid, we come back to beer, which has been used for ages because of the ALCOHOL it contains. And how good or bad for you is alcohol? On the “Very Bad” side were the Prohibitionists who, almost within living memory, tried to eliminate the sale, manufacture, or transportation of “intoxicating liquors” in the U.S.A. by amendment to the Federal Constitution. The “badness” of alcohol continues to this day, with uncounted road deaths, marital breakups, and other calamities attributable to it. But that notorious Amendment lasted only 13 years and was then repealed.

Does this mean that alcohol is good for you? Here we come up against words like “addiction” and “moderation.” The English expression has it that “A little of what you fancy does you good.” Certain religions, including Christianity and Judaism, make whole elaborate rituals out of the drinking of wine.

But alcohol is only one of many widely consumed ingredients whose goodness for you, or otherwise, is almost maddeningly controversial. Another one is CAFFEINE. You probably don’t need me to tell you that caffeine is a psychoactive drug which is legal and unregulated almost everywhere in the world, that it is to be found, to varying amounts, in tea, chocolate, cola, and of course coffee. But only relatively recently have its potentially harmful effects become so much a matter of public awareness that its removal from substances such as coffee or tea is itself a popular element in marketing. It was probably Sanka (from “Sans Caffeine”) which first struck this rich vein in the commercial goldfield. Since then, various forms of “decaf” products have proliferated. 

Such tampering with a favorite beverage has not necessarily endeared itself to growers of the derivative bean. According to a once-popular song, everybody in one country was expected to take it straight, and plenty of it. In fact:

A politician’s daughter
Was accused of drinking water,
and was fined a great big Fifty Dollar Bill –
They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

And what do we put in our coffee? One essential, for many people, used to be SUGAR, a product on which empires have been built, but that is now nutritionally as much of a no-no as caffeine itself. I was made starkly aware of this by one true incident in a book called Sugar Blues, wherein a ship whose cargo was chiefly sugar, was wrecked on an island, and the marooned crew had nothing but sugar to eat for weeks. Its effect on their health was disastrous. No restaurant table is now complete without artificial sweeteners.

Finally, let me remind you of the evils of SALT, whose known importance in our diet goes far back in time, but the dangers of whose excessive consumption have now led to whole lines of “low-salt” and “no-salt” products.

Similarly FAT, which, as in “The Fat of the Land,” was once a by-word for prosperity and plenty, is now another double-edged sword, leading us to seek low-fat and no-fat foods.

All-in-all, nowadays, you had better be very careful in your eating, if you know what’s good for you.