Stop Press: Beer fights cancer and heart disease
Scientists at Austria's Innsbruck Medical University say drinking beer can stave off heart disease.
Apparently chemicals in beer can have a beneficial anti-inflammatory impact on coronary heart disease.
The team said: "Moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages is suggested to reduce cardiovascular risk. Within this context, most attention is drawn to antioxidant ingredients of wine, but also beer was found to be beneficial."
This comes just weeks after scientists in Japan apparently discovered that beer has an amazing ability to fight cancer in laboratory mice.
Here comes the science bit...Some cancers are caused by DNA-damaging chemicals found in cooked meat and fish.
When scientists at Okayama University fed these chemicals to mice they found the DNA damage to their liver, lungs and kidneys was reduced by up to 85% if the mice drank beer instead of water.
The bad newsThe bad news is the mice were tested using non-alcoholic beer.
Sakae Arimoto-Kobayashi, who led the team, told New Scientist magazine: "The total benefits and risks of beer with alcohol are still under consideration."
He believes some as yet unidentified compounds in beer prevent the bad chemicals from binding with DNA.
He hopes he can identify them and get brewers to produce beers which are particularly rich in them.
As a note of caution the New Scientist says heavy alcohol consumption is blamed for around 6% of all cancers in western countries - though moderate consumption reduces the risk of heart disease.
