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Drink to your health: the benefits of beer

Drink to your health: the benefits of beer

By Gary Magenheimer

Studies show that beer will actually keep you healthy.

No, you did not misread that.

The idea of beer being healthy, to me at least, feels almost wrong to type out.

It feels like I’d have to follow that statement with something equally absurd like, “Eating four steaks in sequence promotes luxurious hair,” or, “Man sticks hand in active beehive to exfoliate skin, now silky smooth.”

In fact, mentioning beer seems to push the “unhealthy” button in almost anyone’s subconscious. Thoughts usually come to mind of middle-aged men who greet a room with their stomachs long before their faces do, and images of all-night benders, heinous hangovers, and regrettable decisions tend to follow shortly after.

However, I think with these new findings, beer can drop almost all this negative stigma and be perceived as genuinely beneficial and not just another method of
getting smashed.

Enter Keiji Kondo, he is a member of the Research and Development Department of the Kirin Brewery Company. He is one of the researchers whose studies have brought this strange news to light.

In one of his reports, he states that, “the light-to-moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages is associated with significant reductions in all-cause mortality, particularly cardiovascular.” Basically, this means that beer will help your heart not give out from a Death Note-style cardiac arrest. The article goes on to mention and detail how certain chemicals and a high silica content found in hops, a main component in brewing beer, may help prevent the onset of some nasty ailments. Things like osteoporosis, type II diabetes, and even formation of certain cancer cells are on the shortlist of things that beer keeps at bay.

In a Newsweek Global article published in 2015, it was also mentioned that beer actually helps decrease obesity, instead of increasing it. This means that the aforementioned “beer gut” is usually caused by the food that’s eaten with beer rather than beer itself.

These findings mean that beer not only makes you feel like the crowned king of socializers whilst you’re
“impressing” that one girl from English 1301 with your Halo LAN party stories (“Dude, you just had to be there”), but it also makes your body quite a bit healthier doing so.

Even with all its benefits, however, it’s still an alcoholic beverage. Don’t get too eager to become the healthiest guy, gal, or non-binary pal on campus and go out doing keg-stands with that Thaddeus Chinstrap fellow you met in G building.  —This is all in terms of 1 beer a day.

Not to mention that if you do follow through with that wicked keg-stand, you’ll end up offsetting the numerous health benefits by either, A: giving you a massive hangover, or B: having all that healthy beer pumped out of your stomach by some doctor who’s going to make jokes about your “health cleanse” to Sharon at the receptionist’s desk.

Don’t make Sharon disappointed in you; keep it classy people.

As long as you do keep it in moderation, you’ll be rewarded with a healthier body, a happy conscience, and a great excuse to invite your buddies over for a cold one. (For health purposes, of course!)

— Gary Magenheimer is a contributor and engineering major.

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