I just found this blog I posted a really really long time ago on another site, but it deserves reposting here. BEER IS GOOD FOR YOU! I was sober when I wrote it, if you can believe that.
Disclaimer: This is a somewhat random blog with random little tidbits taken from a bunch of completely random sources, including random websites, random books, and last but not nearly least... my own random demented head. I claim none of the wording as my own, altho I added touches of me here and there and paraphrased a good deal where needed. It's all true tho! Every little letter.Due to recent and age-long studies, scientists now think that some ancient civilizations probably used beer as a source of antibiotics. Some bones recovered from archaelogical digs over in Africa contain traces of tetracycline, indicating to scientists that streptomycedes (a bacteria that causes the growth of tetracycline) was consumed by natives in two of the staples of their diet... beer and bread. Sounds kind of Irish if you ask me.
Streptomycedes is a common soil bacteria. The natives would store grain in mud bins heavy with this bacteria, then use some of the grain to make it into a dough. They'd bake the dough at fairly high temperatures for a short time, flash-baking it if you will. The rest of the grain they'd malt by laying it out on a cloth and putting water on it, making it germinate. For all you bio noobs out there, that means it grows and sprouts and other such living-plant things as releasing tasty sugars essential to the brewing process. The malated grain was taken and ground up and put in water for a couple days to ferment and start turning into not-so-tasty primitive-type beer. It of course didn't taste like the stuff we have today, well not most of it anyway. It turns out more like a sour mash taste but hey, it'll still get you toasty. A daily regiment of sour mash and tasty bread gives a nice therapeutic dose of tetracycline... and might even get you snockered.
There's a little known, altho once highly common, practice called mortuary cannibalism in which a recently deceased body is consumed by family, friends, and tribe. Anthropologists sometimes refer to it as compassionate cannibalism but the logic of the practice is summed up nicely by a quote often attributed to the Cocomo Indians of Peru, who explained that it was "better to be inside a friend than to be swallowed up in the cold Earth." Mortuary cannibalism has been well-documented in South America, particulary the eating of the bones of the dead, properly called osteophagy. Mind you, South American tribes didn't simply de-bone their loved ones and begin gnawing on their ulnas. Instead, they ground the bones and concocted complex meals with them, including mixing them with honey, cooking them into soups (mm marrow stew!), and brewing them into manioc beer. No, that's manioc not maniac... nutballs. Manioc is a shrubby tropical plant common to South America, eaten as a staple food there... after drying it to remove naturally high cyanide levels. Poisonous beer would suck. However, corpse-hinted manioc beer rocks! Especially the part about tribal women chewing up the manioc mash and spitting it into a bowl to ferment.
Now back to tetracycline. It's used to treat bacterial infections, as we've already established. But we didn't cover what the major bacterial infections were! Pneumonia, respiratory tract infections, acne, skin/genital/urinary system infections, AND the infection that causes stomach ulcers! Got stress? Got an ulcer? Have a beer! Cure you right up.
Got prom? Got zits? Have a beer! Cure your face up and make you look hot. Hell give your date one too, make you look even hotter.
This particular antibiotic won't work for cold and flu infections, or other viruses but... have a few anyway, soon you wont care that you're sick. Plus they make good chasers for you wusses that can't straight shoot the whiskey!
As a parting gift I leave you with the Phagy Quiz. It's self explanatory. Well actually it's far from it. It has to do with eating tho, and bones, and beer, and lots of other cool stuff... so you should take it regardless, even if you are a intellectually challenged sod.
click me you sod!Extraneous emoticon cause it's too cute:
