Is The Beer Belly A Myth?

With more than 60,000 visitors still recovering from power-pounding beers at the Great American Beer Festival last weekend, we thought we’d spread a little good news about beer and your physique. Turns out the dreaded beer belly may be a myth!

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen, recently released a study that addressed the wide-spread belief that drinking beer causes the phenomenon referred to as the beer belly.

The researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (we’re not sure what that means, but it sounds sufficiently impressive) and re-examined past conclusions.

In an effort to assess a DIRECT link between guzzling beer and the infamous beer gut, researchers retrieved all the available scientific studies with data on beer consumption “that might support the belief that beer drinking is responsible for deposition of body fat.”

The team was careful to make a distinction between general obesity (one’s body mass index) and abdominal obesity (waist circumference or waist-to-hip ratio) basically the fat stored mainly in the belly.

A total of 35 prior observational studies and 12 intervention experiments, which tapped around 500 subjects, were analyzed by the University of Copenhagen researchers.

The team was left unimpressed by many of the prior studies they ‘poured over,’ referring to them as confounding and ‘low quality” at best.

And in spite of the fact that this study was funded by the Dutch Beer Institute, the researchers did find time to indict beer drinkers as a lower life form in general…

“People preferring beer differ from non-drinkers or wine consumers with regards to multiple lifestyle factors that are related to obesity. For example, beer drinkers are known to have a less healthy diet, are more often smokers and are less active.”

But on a positive note, those same researchers concluded that based on those earlier studies there was INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE that drinking beer could be directly linked to a bulbous belly.

 And given the amount of beer we put away over the weekend, we can’t help but be encouraged by their findings.

So as things stand now in the scientific world the question of whether we can keep calling a fat belly, a beer belly, remains inconclusive.

And we’ll drink to that…