I’m wondering about pregnancy and non-alcoholic beers. The NA beers are under 0.5% ABV. These are becoming more common, but there seems to be little research.
—Pregnant wife of a brewer
First of all, I would be remiss if I didn’t briefly touch on the alcohol-in-pregnancy taboo. I spend a lot of time on it in Expecting Better, and it’s a literature I have continually paid attention to in revisions to the book. What I argue there is that while it’s clear that there are risks to drinking heavily and binge drinking, the data on occasional drinking during pregnancy does not suggest these same risks. These data come from large studies, mostly run in Europe and Australia. I’m not going to go into that in detail here, but I wanted to note it.
However! Many people avoid alcohol in pregnancy (also great!), and non-alcoholic beer is a common substitute. If you haven’t tried them recently, I will note that these products have improved tremendously in the last decade. Although I am not pregnant and this womb is decidedly closed, I drink Athletic Brewing IPA on a pretty regular basis.
As you point out, these beers are restricted to have less than 0.5% alcohol by volume. A typical beer would have, perhaps, 5% (although certain kinds of beer can be as high as 9% to 10%). So while these are much lower in alcohol, it’s not zero. That feature, though, is shared with many other things: the level of alcohol in a non-alcoholic beer is comparable to or lower than many fruit juices (orange, apple, grape) and also many breads. The fact is that a lot of foods contain trace amounts of alcohol without being labeled as such.
Put differently: if you’re willing to drink orange juice while pregnant (which you should be), a non-alcoholic beer is no different.
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