Hops for the Holidays, Enjoy Beer this Year

With every holiday season parties invites go out, online warnings of overeating and calorie-counting start circulating, and indulgence is at an all time high for the end of the year. Once January rings in, the most popular New Year’s resolutions are made: eat healthy, drink or smoke less, and lose weight. Even though the amount of alcohol consumed is usually higher during the winter months and moderation should always be followed, forego the red wine or champagne cocktail and excuse a beer or two to save your health.

We have known for years that red wine carries all kinds of antioxidants and heart-healthy chemicals that make it easy to follow doctor’s orders and drink a glass a night or a few times a week to ensure a good, pumping heart. However, studies have shown that beer can have the same result as red wine in helping the heart. One beer a day for a woman or up to two a day for a man can reduce the risk for stroke, the third leading cause of death in America. Beer contains about the same amount of polyphenols—chemical groupings serving as antioxidants—as red wine and four to five times the antioxidants found in white wine.

Similar studies from 1999 proved that stroke risk is lower when beer is added to the diet. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, volunteers drinking a beer a day or a beer a week held no difference in their lowered stroke risk, showing that moderate to light drinkers can decrease the risk 20 percent. The Texas Southwestern Medical Center also reported that moderate to heavy drinkers consuming at least two beers a day, have a 30 to 40 percent lower risk of heart disease than those that don’t drink at all.

Beer is also good in helping curb your holiday drinking because it fills you up. Consuming a twelve ounce beer can make you feel full faster than if you drank a few glasses of champagne, a juice-laden festive punch, or a martini because the carbohydrates in beer are easily absorbed into your system. Besides helpful carbohydrates, most beers also contain Vitamin B for preventing amino acid buildup, calcium for maintaining strong bones, and almost no fat content or cholesterol.

If any demographic wants beer to be recommended as part of a daily, healthy diet, it would be college students. A recent study done by students at Texas’ Rice University announced plans to make beer healthier by enhancing its ingredients. A chemical found in red wine in the 1990’s called resveratrol has been proven to show qualities of slowing down or prevention of the aging process in organisms from flies and fish to yeast and elderly mice. Even though these effects have not been proven in humans, red wine still carries the label of anti-aging and beer wants its turn.

Rice University’s plan was to manipulate yeast with the chemical resveratrol so beer can try to even the healthy score, but the supposed anti-aging chemical having been produced in yeast in previous studies has turned out to be ineffective because when it is exposed to air, resveratrol becomes deactivated. The Rice University Six needed to find a way to keep it active while still compiling it within the liquid. If the students could successfully introduce resveratrol into the yeast during the fermentation process without air, the progress could amount to a future of introducing oxygen-sensitive pharmaceuticals into yeast and consequently, into beer. Taylor Stevenson, one of the Rice University Six says he and his team aren’t out to prove that beer consumption should be abused, “It's not going to prevent you from getting a beer gut from drinking too much beer, or from getting cirrhosis of the liver,” continues the Texas undergrad of Project BioBeer, “But people are already drinking beer, so why not make the activity a little healthier?”

With this advice, we may wonder what else we can make healthier this holiday season. Should turkey fryers come with a treadmill? Do cocktail-party appetizers or homemade treats have a gym coupon baked inside? Relax these next few weeks and pop open a beer to calm your nerves, ease your stress, help your heart and keep your blood flowing because before you know it January first awaits your resolution.