I knew it!



Not that it would cause me to stop drinking beer, but it is always nice to be vindicated.  I suspect my body instinctively knew how good beer was for me.  It is just nice to have the medical community catch up with me.  Beer has been determined to have some great health benefits (I'm talking about the physical benefits, the mental ones are obvious).

1. Strong bones.  Beer has silicon which is important for building bone density.  Better still, a 2010 study showed that the rich, hoppy micro brew type beers were the best for you and the light lagers and the non-alcoholic beers were the least good for you.
2. Stronger heart.  A study last year aggregated the data from 16 previous studies which meant they ended up with 200,000 subjects.  And the evidence of the heart health benefits was startling.  People who quaffed a pint of beer daily had a thirty one percent lower risk of heart disease.  We will just skip over the part about how those benefits declined and went the other way if you drank too much...
3. Healthy Kidneys. A recent scandanavian study showed that people who drank a beer a day had a forty percent lower chance of developing a kidney stone.  They postulated that the beer helped lessen leaching of calcium from the bones and also flushed out the kidneys.
4. My personal favorite-increased brain capacity.  A 2005 study found that daily beer drinkers had up to a 20% lower risk of dementia or Alzheimer's.  They also scored 18 months mentally younger than non-drinkers.  I know the scientific reason why beer makes you smarter, too.  So I am not accused of academic plagiarism, I first saw it postulated by Cliff Claven on Cheers.  Everyone knows that beer kills brain cells.  And everyone knows that's nature's way is for the weakest to die off first and for the strong to survive.  Ergo, the more you drink the more you kill of the weak brain cells so only your strong ones thrive.
5. Lower caner risk.  Apparently it must be haute cuisine to marinade steak in beer in Portugal.  That is the only reason I can come up with as to why they would do a study about the effects of such marinating, but they did.  And the miracle fluid that is beer once again came through with shining colors.  It showed that a 70% reductions in the carcinogens known as heterocyclic amines or HCAs.  Maybe it was the antioxidants or the sugars that blocked formation of HCAs, or maybe just a Divine protection from Bacchus, but it works.
6. More vitamins.  Beer drinkers had a 30% higher level of B6 in their blood than non-drinkers or wine drinkers according to a study in the Netherlands.  It also found higher levels of folic acid and B12.
7. Stroke preventor.  No less than the Harvard School of Public Health found that moderate beer intake lowered the incidence of strokes.  The theory is that it literally thins your blood and helps to prevent the formation of clots.
8. Lower risk of diabetes.  Staying with Harvard, another study of 38,000 middle aged men (no, I wasn't asked to participate) revealed a 25% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes.  Apparently beer increases the body's insulin sensitivity which in turn reduces the risk of diabetes.
9. Lower blood pressure.  Maybe I should have gone to Harvard because they seem to drink a lot of beer there.  In yet another study they did, this time of 25-40 year olds, there was a twenty five percent lower risk of high blood pressure if you were a moderate beer drinker.
10. Live longer.  Here is the really cool thing.  A paper published by the US Department of Agriculture that looked at 50 previous studies in 2005 showed that beer drinkers lived longer than non-imbibers.  So you get to drink more beer!!