For as long as I can remember drinking beer has been associated with growing your gut, hence the term beer belly. That might not longer be the case though as a new study has found out that drinking beer might actually make you lose weight.

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The study was carried out at Oregon State University and it discovered that if you feed mice a bunch of xanthohumol – a flavonoid found in hops and beer – then it helped mice lower their cholesterol levels and lose weight. The team split 48 male mice into two groups and fed them both a high fat diet, but gave one set 30-60 milligrams of xanthohumol per kilogram of bodyweight each day for 12 weeks.

This set ended up gaining 22% less weight and cut their harmful cholesterol levels by 80%. Result.

Here’s the bad news though – you have to consume an absolute shitload of xanthohumol for any changes to be experienced. And by a shitload I mean like pretty much the most in history ever.

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Basically, if you weighed ten stone you would need to drink 3500 pints of beer in 24 hours to reach the equivalent that was fed to these mice. I know some of us might like to think we’re big drinkers, but I don’t think anyone in history could reach those kind of levels.

So I suppose there’s a chance that drinking a few pints at the weekend might help you lose weight slightly, but it looks completely irrelevant when you think about the figures. In fact, I’m not even sure why Oregon State University has even commissioned this study as the results of it literally have no bearing on reality or anyone’s life whatsoever. They’re pretty much completely useless.

There is a low calorie high protein beer entering the market soon though. That might actually help you lose weight, unlike this dumb study.