If drink we lack

As I’ve often said on StatsChat, if you’re eating dark chocolate or drinking red wine primarily for the health benefits, you’re doing it wrong. Now the problem is spreading to beer. Stuff has a headline “Could beer help fend off Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s?” As you’d expect, the answer is “Not really.” 

The story is unusually light on information, not giving the journal name, the names of any of the researchers, or the names of any of their institutions.  Through Google, I found a story in the Telegraph, where the headline is even worse — “Beer could help ‘protect brain against Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s'” — but at least they link to a press release.

The press release headline “Beer compound could help fend off Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases”  looks less extreme than the newspaper ones, but the lead is

The health-promoting perks of wine have attracted the spotlight recently, leaving beer in the shadows. But scientists are discovering new ways in which the latter could be a more healthful beverage than once thought.

They, finally, do link to the research paper, in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. If you think that sounds a slightly strange place to publish research about the health effects of beer, well, it would be if that was what the research was about.  The abstract says

As an active component in beers, [xanthohumol]’s presence has been suggested to be linked to the epidemiological observation of the beneficial effect of regular beer drinking.

That is, the research assumes a beneficial effect of beer and is trying to work out what the mechanism might be. The research wasn’t in people, or even in mice, or even in mouse brain cells. It was in a standard lab cell line of nerve-like cells originally from a cancer of the adrenal gland in a rat.

You might also ask if there’s any research closer to live people. Last year, scientists at Oregon State University studied high doses of xanthohumol in mice.  They found it improved cognitive function in young mice, but not in old mice, and also pointed out

 the levels of xanthohumol used in this study were only possible with supplements. As a fairly rare micronutrient, the only normal dietary source of it would be through the hops used in making beer, and “a human would have to drink 2000 liters of beer a day to reach the xanthohumol levels we used in this research.”

That’s not really compatible with the new drink-driving limits.