Monday, June 12, 2006

17 beers a day for better health?


Once again, Yahoo has served up a misleading headline that drives home the point that you need to read articles and not just browse headlines. Furthermore, you then need to analyze the information and decide what it means. In this case, at least, not much analysis is needed.

"Beer ingredient may fight prostate cancer " reads the headline.

The article, in fact, tells a far different story, mainly that you probably need to drink about 17 beers a day for this to be true. Can 17 beers a day be healthy? C'mon! Without even discussing its alcohol content, we're talkin' about 3,000 calories consisting of alcohol and carbs--not exactly the Zone. With a diet like this you'll die long before prostate cancer has any sort of chance to affect your healthy at all.

What this article is actually telling us is that not all of beer's ingredients are bad for us but, in order to have a balanced diet, we need to eat other foods as well. Hardly a sexy headline but, unfortunately, that's the way it is.

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