Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2016
We use rich IRI household- and individual-level data sets to examine the relationships between heart disease and type 2 diabetes with alcohol consumption. We control for a wide variety of potential confounders, including diet quality and lifestyle choices. Beer has long been studied in related literature to ambiguous outcomes. We explore the role of beer consumption in detail by separating craft beer from macrobeer and imported beer. The results indicate that most alcohol types could have protective effects against heart disease and diabetes, with the strongest effects occurring for craft beer and wine. Treating beer as a single, homogenous category in health studies likely leads to measurement error. (JEL Classifications: D12, I12, R20, L66, P36)
We are thankful to participants at the 2015 Beeronomics Conference in Seattle and the 2016 American Association of Wine Economists Conference in Bordeaux for helpful feedback and suggestions on this manuscript. We are grateful to Abigail Okrent, Jessica Todd, and Annemarie Kuhns at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS) for their work in organizing foods in the Information Resources Incorporated (IRI) data to enable the calculation of dietary scores. We also thank an anonymous referee for a number of helpful comments and suggestions on the manuscript. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and may not be attributed to the USDA or the ERS. This research was conducted using a third-party agreement with IRI.