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Ingredients in Beer as a Cancer Treatment?
ThePuceGuardian writes to tell us Biology News Net is reporting that one of the compounds found only in hops has gained rapid notice as a micronutrient that may help prevent many types of cancer. From the article: "Quite a bit is now known about the biological mechanism of action of this compound and the ways it may help prevent cancer or have other metabolic value. But even before most of those studies have been completed, efforts are under way to isolate and market it as a food supplement. A "health beer" with enhanced levels of the compound is already being developed."
This is when I realize that I shouldn't make stupid (albeit funny) comments when you have mod points.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
I suppose this health beer would have lots of hops. I have a suggestion for a name for it. We could call it an India Pale Ale. Oh, wait...
There are many things that may help prevent cancer.
There are very few things you can use to treat cancer.
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While in my mid-20s I'm not considering myself old, I wonder if the number of food/beverage-related cancer stories I've come across is still in the double digits. If someone had the endurance to sum them all up, I guess the result would be something like that:
Use common sense. Eat and drink whatever you have been eating and drinking all your life and whatever you feel like, but don't be excessive in quantity in either direction. Most important, eat and drink in enjoyable company of family or friends, take your time, and don't stress yourself out. While all of this is still no guarantee for anything, it certainly does not damage your overall health. Humanity has survived and prospered for millennia without reading a single cancer study.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
It is known by archeologists that the process of creating beer in ancient societies (Egypt, Africa), often led to the contamination of the storage containers by the streptomycedes bacterium. This in turn led to the production of the antibiotic "tetracycline". The physicans of the time knew that beer was a good cure for ailments, but not why.
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but I assume (making an ass of u and me) that the evidence they're talking about are enzymatic activity assays from isolated tissues.
I think that is a fair assumption (caveat included). But note that the trigger for looking at the bioflavinoids was a statistical anomoly that has been dubbed the French Paradox. Some groups in France who eat a traditional diet that is high in fats and such were having a much lower incidence of heart disease than was predicted by American based statistics. Several investigations by unrelated researchers have been done and these clearly show that the high levels of proanthocyanidins in french table wines protect against cholesterol and LDL diseases. And almost as an aside, it was found that these very potent antioxidants also protect against some cancers.
The proanthocyanidins found in wine, grape seeds, and virtually all deeply colored fruits are in the larger class of bioflavinoids. The prenylflavinoids found in hops are also bioflavinoids.
Having spent some time in Corvallis and thus being aware of the beverage of choice at OSU, I am not at all surprised that OSU took up the study of the prenylflavonoids in beer. I think that's a good choice for pragmatic reasons-- it would be very easy to find candidates for a four year longitudinal study of beer ingestion among the OSU undergraduate population. It would be much more difficult to entice OSU students into embibing significant quantities of red wine... the wine drinkers all go to University of Oregon, not Oregon State University, you see. While the two are only about an hour's drive from each other, OSU and UO students mix about as well as a "lager" poured from a can mixes with a "chianti" from a box.
Back to a more serious level: there are now a number of grape seed extracts (GSE) being sold as nutritional supplements. These are an inexpensive way of assuring that there are plenty of bioflavinoids in the diet-- although they probably are not as fun as drinking a quart of red wine a day,