Top 5 Myths about Alcohol
Choose your poison, ladies and gents. Welcome to WatchMojo's Top 5 Myths, the series that finds the biggest myths people actually believe, and dispels them one by one. In today's instalment, we'll be looking at the top 5 myths about alcohol. Spirits, wine, and beer myths are up grabs today so long as they're widely believed or at least heard of.
Top 5 Myths about Alcohol
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Choose your poison, ladies and gents. Welcome to WatchMojo's Top 5 Myths, the series that finds the biggest myths people actually believe, and dispels them one by one. In today's instalment, we'll be looking at the top 5 myths about alcohol. Spirits, wine, and beer myths are up grabs today so long as they're widely believed or at least heard of.
Myth #5: “Alcohol Warms you up in Cold Weather.”
Nothing warms the bones like a sneaky swig of rot gut from your trusty flask– except, no. It's true that you'll definitely feel warmer but actually being warmer is a lie, a damn dirty lie. A snort of the good stuff actually just makes your blood vessels dilate- not contract like some smart ass baby would tell you. This means blood will flow closer to your skin, making it feel warmer. However, what's actually happening is your skin is robbing heat from your vital organs– you know, things like your liver– and because cold is effectively a vacuum your heat is lost to the chill around you, leaving you colder than when you started. Add in your liquid courage, impaired decision making skills, and lack of shivering and you and your buzz are headed towards hypothermia.
Myth #4: “Wine Competitions Award the Best Wines.”
If a bottle of vino has a gold medal it must be better than the unranked swill beside it, right? Not necessarily. Taste is, unsurprisingly, a subjective matter, so it's only natural that at the end of the day the same would be true for rankings. In fact, studies– including one published in the Journal of Wine Economics in 2008– have concluded that judges in wine contests were consistent with their judgements only 10% of the time. A winning wine in one competition may be ignored completely in the next. The typical judge could easily score the same wine as “acceptable” on one tasting and as “excellent” a few minutes later. The International Wine Challenge awards literally thousands of medals each year, with over 3400 wines earning bronze status alone in 2015. Be especially leery of “commended” wines, as given the unlikelihood of any wine entered in the IWC failing, “commended” is basically shorthand for “non-toxic”.
Myth #3: “Beer before liquor never been sicker. Liquor before beer, you're in the clear.”
This is sometimes known as “beer before wine, you’ll be fine.” All in all, booze is booze as far as your body is concerned. Regardless if you've had a bottle of Sam or a shot of Jim your liver still needs an hour to process and break down the alcohol you just dumped into it and excessive amounts of either are still going to dehydrate you. Where this myth almost has a grain of truth is in the way people drink different types of beverages. In general, mixed drinks and shots tend to be slammed back while drinkers tend to nurse a beer. Speed drinking some Jack means you're already pretty loaded when that chalice of Stella enters the picture, whereas putting away a polite pair of Millers and then throwing back a fifth of Johnny Red Label is like jumping into warp drive from a standstill. Wow, calling booze by its first name really makes me sound like an alcoholic.
Myth #2: “Beer Gives You a Beer Gut”
Not, rolly-polly, not dumpy, a beer gut is a particular sort of protuberance. There are lots of reasonable sounding explanations as to how beer makes one’s abdomen so bulbous. Some say it’s because beer drinkers also eat a lot of fatty foods, or just drink more alcohol, thereby consuming more calories, than your typical wine drinker. Alcoholism can cause conditions resulting in abdominal distension, but that’s in extreme cases. But studies on the subject of the beer gut, and there have been a few, have failed to consistently drawing strong correlations between drinking beer and having a high proportion of abdominal fat. So all those well-intentioned, sometimes plausible theories are moot.
Myth #1: “Old Wines are Good Wines”
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If we've learned anything from the movies it's that a bottle of 1873 Château de Pamplemousse is the height of sophistication. In actuality it's probably really expensive vinegar. Less than 1% of wines are intended to mature- the rest are meant to be enjoyed now- or at least within five years. A quality wine will likely remain so but a cheap wine– perhaps a “commended” wine– will only get worse. Hang onto that $500 bottle of Bordeaux for your 60th wedding anniversary if you'd like, but there's no point in keeping a $5 bottle of arsenic and cochineal, expecting a glass of heaven when it hits vintage. Furthermore, any wine can go nasty if its not stored properly– keep your wine, even the stuff you stole from your cousin's wedding, out of sunlight and store it on its side. So, how many of these myths did you believe? Do you have an alcohol myth you want to bust? Here's what Google searchers are asking about alcohol. For more vintage Top 10s and commended Top 5s, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.
