Beer: To Health!

It makes me happy to read articles saying that the beer (and coffee) that I love and would have a hard time giving up is good for me. I'm only a sample of one, and there may be other contributing factors, but it makes me happy to compare test results from a few years back to recent ones showing improvements, however slight they may be.

Last year, being that I'm not getting any younger the doc thought it would be prudent to do a full blood work up. Seeing as how the last time was seven years prior, I was actually a bit curious to see if there had been any changes. The results: total cholesterol = 209 (up 1 point), LDL (bad) = 117 (down 10 points), HDL (good) = 79 (up 15 points) and triglycerides = 65 (down 25 points).

More recently, due to a prescription drug I've been on for many, many years that has the potential to decrease bone density, my doc referred me for a bone density scan. I'd had one of these ordered six years ago (under the same reasoning) and of any type of medical testing, this is by far the easiest being that it's completely non-invasive. Fast forward two weeks and the call came from my doc giving me the all clear. Today the actual results showed up in the mail and upon comparison, the numbers were actually slightly improved. (-1.97 to -1.9 lumbar spine and -1.24 to -.9 left femoral neck).

While none of the above results are striking by any means, my diet and exercise have been pretty consistent while my beer consumption has remained steady if not increased slightly. And according to these results, to no detriment. In fact, I'll chalk the improvements up to the silicon and other ingredients in beer and pour myself another. Cheers!