Back in 2009, Manuel Garzon of Granada University did an interesting experiment. He had some students run on a treadmill in a room that was heated to 104 degrees Farenheit. Naturally, the students started sweating and rapidly tired out; their bodies depleted of electrolytes and water.
Garzon gave half the subjects Spanish lager and the other half plain water. The group of students who drank the Spanish lager were hydrated faster and to a better level than the ones who drank plain water. The reason being that the lager beer contained calories, sugars, carbohydrates and salts.
It's no wonder they call beer "liquid bread".
The second part of the modern beer story comes from Griffith Health Institute in Australia in August 2013. GHI’s Centre for Health Practice Innovation Associate Professor Ben Desbrow had been studying the ability to reduce alcohol and improve the hydrating effects of commercial beer.
By manipulating the electrolytes on different types of commercial beer, regular and lite beer, GHI came up with a lite beer that was one third more hydrating than normal commercial beer.
GHI's team is focusing on reducing the dangers associated with beer as a product, rather than trying to get people to change their recreational behavior.
They realize that people engaged in highly physical types of work often have a beer after their shift and seem to recover quickly or do not seem to have any effects at all, but they maintain that having a regular beer after being depleted of water and electrolytes is not the optimum way to rehydrate.
Ben Desprow's work can be found in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.
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