Is it okay to serve non-alcoholic beer to children?

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Richard Mattick over the phone from Sydney. “I have nothing against a beer every now and then. In fact, I’m now sitting in a pub with a beer.” Mattick is a professor at the National Center for Drug and Alcohol Research at the University of New South Wales (Australia). He does not want to be seen as a moral knight: there is nothing wrong with an occasional drink, according to him. What he is fighting against is excessive alcohol consumption. And that is exactly why all those non-alcoholic beers that are now flooding the market worry him.

Because you now see children who drink 0.0 beers regularly. Christoph Meeussen wonders whether he should follow that trend. “Can I also give my son 0.0, or would it be better to have a Coke?” he asks the science shop. The latter, Mattick believes. Or better yet: a glass of water.

Non-alcoholic beers are healthier than soft drinks that are chock full of sugar and therefore contribute to the obesity pandemic. But there is another side effect, and that is that those thirst quenchers can promote alcohol addiction later. At least, that’s what experts suspect.

“If you get used to the taste at a young age, it lowers the threshold for the real thing. You run the risk that children will become interested in beer with alcohol at a younger age. You also create brand loyalty.” Young children who swear by Heineken, Duvel or Leffe? It really can’t get much crazier.

But what concrete indications are there that this works? You could also reason that young people who drink non-alcoholic beer and enjoy it will continue to do so once they reach adulthood. Serving alcohol-free beer by parents would then encourage responsible drink consumption.

There is no research yet that provides a definitive answer to this. A long-term Australian study, led by Mattick, does offer some insights. The study indicates that parents who try to promote responsible drinking behavior in their children by introducing them to alcohol under supervision often achieve the opposite.

“In many countries it is tradition that children are allowed to have a little drink. A small splash of wine in a glass of water. A few sips of beer. This usually does not cause any problems. But for some young people this leads to a change in their sense of norms. They get the feeling that alcohol consumption is okay.”

Around 2010, Mattick and his colleagues started the study in which almost 2,000 children aged around twelve and their parents participated. In some of the families, the children occasionally drank some alcohol (provided by parents with the best intentions). For other families this was out of the question.

For years, the scientists followed the drinking habits of the children. The study has now been running for fifteen years. In 2018 they published an interim assessment in the scientific journal The Lancet. Children from the ‘alcohol group’ got into trouble much more often as teenagers. Think of alcohol poisoning, binge drinking, fights in the pub or unwanted sexual behavior. Such excesses occurred two to three times more often among them.

Mattick: “Children get a taste. And that encourages alcohol consumption. I think you can also consider 0.0 beer as a taster. There is no evidence for this. But there is also such a thing as the precautionary principle. When in doubt, don’t do it.”