JOIN USResearchers who have analysed 16 studies involving more than 2,00,000 participants found that the heart disease risk for moderate beer drinkers — those who drank about a pint a day — was reduced by 31 per cent on average.
The findings, published online by the European Journal of Epidemiology, confirmed what was already known about wine, said the researchers.
“In our research we considered wine and beer separately: you first observe a reduction in cardiovascular risk with low to moderate drinking,” said Simona Costanzo, first author of the study, conducted at research labs at the Fondazione di Ricerca e Cura “Giovanni Paolo II” in Campobasso, Italy.
“Then, with an increasing consumption, you can see that the advantage disappears, until the risk gets higher. The interesting part of our research is that, among the studies selected for this meta-analysis, there were 12 in which wine and beer consumption could be compared directly,” she said.
“Using these data we were able to observe that the risk curves for the two beverages are closely overlapping.”
But beer as well as wine, drinkers, should be cautious before toasting too much at these results, researchers added.