The healthiness of beer has been under scrutiny for quite a while. Some argue that even drinking two beers a day can damage your brain. Others say even a little alcohol can raise your risk of cancer. Now, though, the tables have turned, and scientists say drinking lager beer can actually be good for you. So long as you do it in moderation.
Is drinking beer actually good for you?
According to a new study, drinking one lager (whether alcoholic or non-alcoholic) a day can be very good for you. That’s because lager beer appears to increase the diversity of your gut bacteria. This, the researchers behind the study say, can reduce the risk for some diseases.
According to a press release shared by the American Cancer Society, our gastrointestinal tracts house trillions of microorganisms. These microorganisms can directly impact our body’s well-being. Additionally, scientists say the more bacterium types we have present, the lower our chances of contracting chronic diseases will be.
But what does this have to do with lager beer and whether or not beer is good for you? Well, the question of whether or not beer is good for you has been on everyone’s mind for decades.
Previous studies have looked into whether beer can provide additional bacteria diversity in the human gut. But nobody had ever really tested whether drinking alcoholic or non-alcoholic beer was good or bad for you.
Distilling results
According to the researchers, who published their study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, it doesn’t matter whether the beer is alcoholic or non-alcoholic. In their study, two groups drank 11 fluid ounces of lager beer at dinner for four weeks.
At the end of the four-week period, the participants all had more diverse gut bacteria, supposedly proving that beer is actually good for you.
It’s an interesting set of results, and worth noting because it dived into whether the beer had to be alcoholic or non-alcoholic. Of course, as I noted above, there is a lot of research and background around how healthy drinking beer can be. And much of it points toward consuming alcohol of any kind as being unhealthy.
As such, the researchers say that people who want to drink a beer a day may choose to go with a non-alcoholic beverage. It will provide a more diverse set of bacteria in your gut but will also avoid the unhealthy concerns that alcohol brings to the table.
