June 2015 Health benefit part 1

Now to start off, yes there are health benefits but I will also point out that this is about moderate consumptions and not the strong beers we have today. Alcoholism is a serious thing and not something to be taken lightly.

But, however, there are positive things about drinking beer and looking at it from a historical point of view where the alcohol content was a lot less in general one can see that drinking beer daily could keep you healthy (or at least less unhealthy) compared to not drinking it. And this was well known, St Hildegard of Bingen often recommended beer for a numerous occassions to cure all kinds of illness. Often she would write "cerevisiam bibat", "drink beer". Also the use of hops was known to help keep the human body
in good health. John Gerard wrote 1597 in Herbal or Generall Historie of Plantes "The manifold vertues of Hops do manifest argue the wholesomeness of beere for the hops rather make it all physicall drinke to keepe the body in health than an ordinary drinke of quenching of thirst". This gains support by the fact that some hop-derived compounds (humulone and phyto-estrogens) is found in
beer. Humulone is, among other things, an antioxidant and phytoestrogens are believed to help reduce the risk of cancer, particularly breast cancer.

 A note to be made here was that hops was expensive and ordinary people could, most likely, not afford
the amount of beer with a lot of hops for a prolonged period of time to have more bad effect than positive one. And as such, it could be a good advice. However, those that could afford a higher quantity would most likely suffer the drawbacks as well. Evidence of that can be found but that is for a another article.

Modern science has shown that a moderate consumption of beer will make the human body more resistant against kidney stones, parikisons disease and dementia among other things. I write more resistant, not at all completely protected. Modern medication are much more effective against such ailments but looking at it from a historical point of view, anything that could aid you would be of benefit. If your chances by avoiding such an ailment could increase by as little as 5% wouldnt you take it?

A survey of german beer has shown that you could get part of your daily intake of dietary fibers from beer. That survey was made on modern beer with higher alchohol content, however, given the amount of beer a normal person would drink even though it would be around 0.5% compared to the 5-6% of modern beer you can still see that a regular intake of dietary fibers will come from beer.