Friday Beer Blogging – Research Funds Well Spent

First off, let’s clear up what I am enjoying right now: Yuengling Porter. On a graduate student salary you can’t fill the fridge with better beer for the price. We had our French card club over a week ago and we still haven’t finished the cheese and sausage (pancetta, sorpressata etc.) left in the fridge, not to mention the beer. I know, it’s a tough life.

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Never let it be said that we at Balloon Juice ignore the many good scientists working on the topic of beer. Two stories come via the Good Beer Blog, which in my opinion is not good but excellent. If you haven’t bookmarked it already please do so.

Do you need a practical reason to drink beer? Maybe you do, I don’t. This can’t hurt:

[S]cientists who met in Brussels under the chairmanship of Professor Jonathan Powell, of the Medical Research Council human nutrition unit in Cambridge, were largely concerned with the influence of beer on human health.

Professor Powell said that the media and the public had tended to focus on the advantages of wine drinking in moderation. In his opinion there is increasing evidence that the benefits of moderate drinking are more related to the alcohol, whatever the nature of the drink, than to a particular beverage. Beer also contains nutrients and other properties that encourage good health.

In a controlled study in Germany, it was found that people who drank beer in moderation were less likely to develop coronary heart disease than those who drank other drinks.

Not only did the beer drinkers have better protection from heart attacks, but there was supporting evidence for beer’s cardio-protective effect and for its help in altering the ratio of beneficial high-density lipoprotein cholesterol to the pernicious low-density cholesterol.

There were also beneficial changes to the platelets — particles in the blood involved in clotting — and in the amount of fibrinogen, another factor in clotting, present in the blood.

Another surprise, when it comes to keeping your bones intact beer is as useful as calcium supplements:

New research shows that the alcohol in beer appears to suppress the hormones that promote bone loss. And researchers say it may have a better effect on preventing bone loss than calcium.

…Previous studies have shown that silicon found in beer can help strengthen bones. New research by scientists at King’s College and St Thomas’ Hospitals in London, tested groups of healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 50.

The participants were given a variety of beers with different alcoholic strengths, including non-alcoholic. Results showed that over a six-hour period, the ethanol in the beer appeared to block various hormones that lead to weaker bones. The findings are expected to be published later this year.

Finally, people who pour their beer with care have always noticed that a certain population of bubbles near the perimeter of the glass sink rather than rise, seemingly defying the laws of physics. Could every beer glass harbor physical phenomena as strange and arcane as bubble cavitation/sonoluminescence? Recently Richard Zare, a chemist at Stanford, used ultra-high-speed videography to show that the bubbles really do sink and they do it for a perfectly ordinary reason:

Andy got hold of a camera that takes 750 frames a second and recorded some rather gorgeous video clips of what was happening.”

Analyzing the video the two beer aficionados confirmed the Australian computer model’s findings, beer bubbles can and do fall to the bottom of the glass in certain circumstances.

“It’s based on the idea of what goes up has to come down. In this case, the bubbles go up more easily in the center of the beer glass than on the sides because of drag from the walls. As they go up, they raise the beer, and the beer has to spill back, and it does. It runs down the sides of the glass carrying the bubbles — particularly little bubbles — with it, downward. After a while it stops, but it’s really quite dramatic and it’s easy to demonstrate,” Zare said.

Every time that you see another ridiculous government program that makes you want to change your citizenship to Liberia or some equivalent free-market paradise, keep in mind that some fraction of your tax bill pays for essential research like this.

To your health,