I don’t need a scientific reason to choose beer over wine but it never hurts to have one as backup. Researchers did brain scans of patients diagnosed with alcohol dependency (alcoholic) and compared the scans to those of healthy adults.

The ground-breaking study shows that the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in memory, spatial tasks and many other functions, was more than 10 per cent smaller in those whose tipple was wine than in those who favoured beer.

Talk about great news. The researchers from Germany’s Göttingen University think that the findings might be related to a compound found in blood called homocysteine which has been linked to dementia, brain atrophy and strokes. The beer drinkers in the study were found the have the lowest levels of homocysteine. I can’t wait to get home tonight and start drinking some Guinness. Here is my favorite part of the article:

Researchers say that alcohol alone may not account for the differences because the beer and spirit drinkers had greater lifetime consumption of alcohol; in the case of beer drinkers some had consumed twice as much alcohol as the wine lovers.

You might want to read that again. You can drink twice as much beer and still have a bigger brain than a wine drinker. Looks like it is time for me to get my weeknight drink on so that I can start protecting my brain. Hurray beer! Hurray science!

Original Story: The Independent via Dethroner