Paris (AFP)
It is "an attack against the health of the young": the president of the League against cancer, Axel Kahn, asks to tighten the regulation on the beers with very high alcohol content, Monday in the newspaper Le Parisien / Today in France.
"While most are 4-5 or 6-7% alcohol, we see emerging ranges at 14%, and even 16 or almost 17%!" Alarmed Axel Kahn.
"They are sold in 500-ml cans, once opened, they can not be closed again, you have to drink to the dregs, and a young person has consumed the equivalent of a bottle of wine!" he.
"There is an attack against the health of young people," blows the geneticist training elected in June at the head of the League against cancer.
According to the newspaper's calculations, drinking 50cl of 16.8% beer is equivalent to drinking two-thirds of a bottle of port wine or almost all of a 12.5% bottle of wine.
These ultra-strong beers "have flourished in supermarkets, in mini-markets, at a modest price, and their buyers are the street people, and the young," says Kahn, who "asks the authorities to study the issue. and to legislate ".
Two strategies are possible according to him. The first would be to "ban" or at least "withdraw the appellation + beer +" to drinks that "do not use traditional manufacturing processes", because "sugars and yeasts" are added "to increase their effects ".
Another possibility: "very strongly increase the tax according to the weight of alcohol: the strongest would be really more expensive".
"We saw it with tobacco: it is the sanction to the portfolio that gives the best results," said Axel Kahn.
The newspaper points out that these ultra-strong beers sold in supermarkets are not manufactured in France. According to the association Brasseurs de France, questioned by the daily newspaper, beers that exceed 10% of alcohol weigh only 0.5% of the total beer market.
© 2019 AFP