Well, awhile ago I hired a trainer for a few weeks
just to see what I could learn. And one of the first
things he advised me to do was to cut down on the
beer, because of the carbs, not so much the calories.
The way he explained it to me was that unused carbs
eventually turn into fat.
But I still drink beer, just maybe not quite as much
as before.
Which is even more reason to have a very good ber if
you are only going to have 1 or 2 ...
CHeers
WH
--- Steve Hamburg <shamburg(a)SHAMBURG.COM> wrote:
From the Times
of London, September 27. Interesting
that the professor
who led the study shares the same name as a great
Chicago sausage store.
---
Drinks All Round as Beer Myth Goes Belly Up
By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
TAKE a good long look at that bloke throwing darts;
the one with a
bulging stomach that would be more seemly on a woman
about to give
birth.
The result of too many pints in too many public
bars, you might think.
But you would be wrong: drinking beer does not give
you a beer belly.
Is this possible? Are our eyes deceiving us? "Our
eyes are right," said
Martin Bobak of University College London, who has
studied the
phenomenon closely. "But it may not be the beer that
is to blame. Beer
drinking is linked to other aspects of diet and
lifestyle that may cause
beer belly."
When his team started work, Dr Bobak's assumption
was the same as
everybody else's: lots of beer leads inevitably to a
beer belly. "But we
found there is little real evidence in scientific
literature to support
it. Some studies have shown it to be true, others
have shown the
opposite."
To settle the question, the team turned to the Czech
Republic, which
boasts the highest per capita beer consumption in
the world.
They used data from 891 men and 1,098 women aged
between 25 and 64 who
were either non-drinkers or drank exclusively beer
and compared their
body mass index (a measure of overweight) and
waist-hip ratio, which
measures beer belly.
The researchers, including his UCL colleague Sir
Michael Marmot, found
that when corrected for factors such as smoking,
there was no
significant link between beer drinking and beer
belly - and women who
drank beer tended to weigh less, rather than more,
than those who
didn't.
Reporting in the European Journal of Clinical
Nutrition, the team
concludes: "It is unlikely that beer intake is
associated with a largely
increased waist-hip ratio or body mass index . . .
the association
between beer and obesity, if it exists, is probably
weak."
Dr Bobak, who admits to drinking the odd beer
himself, sees no reason
why Czech beer should be any different in its effect
from the British
brew. "The Czechs brew excellent beer," he said,
"but it has the same
calorie content, and the same amounts of sugar and
alcohol as British
beer. Nutritionally, they are very similar."
So the beer is in the clear.
Now, who's shout is it?
__________________________________
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