Re: Beer Belly Myth

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?