Beer is one of the oldest drinks on the planet. And one of the best as far as nutrition goes.

We tend to imagine that our ancestors were ignorant as far as nutrition goes. We imagine that people 2,500 years ago were eating garbage bread with margarine chased down with a diet Mountain Dew. Oh, wait, that’s us. My bad.

We further imagine that these ancestors were nutrient dumb because they didn’t have corporate labs and the FDA to guard their eating habits. Of course, that’s complete stupidity. These same ancestors had the ability to look at eating outcomes and know what was working and what wasn’t. We in turn have been flummoxed more than once by high sounding nutritional bureaucrats who told us patently stupid and wrong things. The margarine joke earlier is just one of many. If you want to see more, you can basically use the Wayback search engine to look at any FDA advice at any time. There you’ll be sold stuff so silly that our ancestors would have died laughing at the fraud.

Back to beer. Our country’s puritanical backdrop wants us to imagine that beer is a terrible thing and the scolds from AA and MADD are there to be cheerleaders for that idea.

But it’s not a terrible thing. Or even bad. It’s really good and it’s good for you. 500 years ago, most ordinary Englishmen had a diet that was mostly made up of three ingredients: beef, bread, and beer. And since if you were poor, beef might be hard to come by every day, well, then it was a lot of bread and beer.

Which is not bad. Despite what the carnivore cranks tell us, a good bread and good beer offer up huge amounts of human nutrients. And combinations like that have sustained humanity for thousands of years. People would eat fruit when it came in season and an occasional vegetable here and there, but they usually had a pretty routinized diet. (A strategy that works for some people for weight loss is to put yourself on a routine diet. Same thing for every meal. In other words, for example, oatmeal for breakfast, soup for lunch, and a chicken breast and broccoli for dinner. You get mildly bored and hopefully eat less).

Beer was such a nutritional powerhouse and important part of the English diet that when tea was first introduced into the English diet, there were widespread complaints that tea was nutritionally lacking (except for some antioxidants, it is) and a frivolous beverage and people drinking it would drink less beer. Which goes to show that you can’t please everybody no matter how hard you try.