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Beer is Now Known to Fight Off Viruses

Dec 08, 12 Beer is Now Known to Fight Off Viruses

If the holiday season is giving you a cold, then you might want to learn how to fight off the symptoms of cold early on and avoid getting bad respiratory illnesses from them. In fact, this wouldn’t just be important to do during the holiday season, but all year round. This would be especially important if you get sick quite easily, in general. Well, one effective way to do this would be by drinking some beer – or so recent research from Japan’s Sapporo Medical University tells us.

The aforementioned study was funded by Sapporo Breweries, one of the most popular beer makers based in Tokyo, Japan. Basically, it has been discovered by Sapporo Breweries that a chemical compound called humulone, which can be found in beer, is actually very effective in fighting off the virus associated with respiratory diseases.

This particular chemical compound can be found inside hops and is known to be
able to effectively reduce inflammation connected to the virus. There is only one
problem here, though: there is only a very minuscule amount of it found in beer,
so people will have to drink around thirty 12-ounce cans of beer if they want to
reap all of the health benefits that comes with the compound that way.

Right now, a researcher from Sapporo Breweries, Jun Fuchimoto, and his team
are trying to find ways to get over this particular problem in order to use the
chemical in future treatments, though. Generally speaking, they are trying to find
out whether it is actually possible to apply humulone to other beverages, or even
to food.

So far, the only challenge in doing so is that the tastes of this compound is quite
bitter, so children might have trouble consuming it. It would be important to find a
way to make children consume the compound, though, since this virus is known
to cause breathing trouble for toddlers and infants, as well as serious pneumonia
in people of every age.

Of course, it goes without saying that infants and young children cannot drink
beer at all. Unfortunately, no known vaccination available in today’s day and age
can currently contain it. However, healthy adults can administer this particular
treatment if they want to.

This isn’t actually the first study that proves that drinking beer comes with a lot of
health benefits. One recent study that was published online, for example, had
researchers suggesting that beer actually has the same positive effects for the
heart that wine has.

The chief commercial officer of Heineken, Alexis Nasard also stated that beer is
both natural and healthy. He also points out that it has much fewer calories
compared to many other beverages out there, like milk. Oh, the wonders of beer!
Is there anything it cannot do?

Naturally, as with most other things in life, though, beer is only beneficial for
people if consumed in moderation. In fact, drinking too much of it could result in
weight gain, heartburn, dehydration, and several other unwanted social and
physical hazards.

Photo credit: Photos.com

 

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D.B. Davis first ventured online in 1984 with his Apple IIe using a service named "The Source". With nearly 30 years of experience online, D.B. has seen it all, and is proud to share it with redOrbit's visitors. After graduating from Vanderbilt with his Bachelor's, D.B. obtained his Master's degree in Institutional Psychology from Oklahoma State University, and then graduated from the prestigious Culinary Institute at the University of South Carolina. While at OSU, D.B. and a classmate founded one of the first Internet marketing companies in the Southwest along with graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin. D.B. and his family reside in Columbia, South Carolina.

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