Health
Beer taste make brain happy!
Beer taste make brain happy!
Bear has long been the drink of choice for men looking to unwind, celebrate a sports event, or to drown out their sorrows and neurologists at the University of Indiana have found the answer: dopamine. The natural chemical released in the “ventral striatum” section of the brain gives off a feeling of “reward”.
The neurologists conducted a controlled study using 49 men. Each man was allowed to choose to drink either Gatorade or their choice of beer. Those opting to drink beer were given just one tablespoon of brew every 15 minutes so that alcohol would not skew the results. A positron emission tomography (PET) attached to each man monitored their brains and found that the dopamine levels were “far” higher as a result of drinking beer than they were for the Gatorade.
What is significant is the men reportedly preferred the taste of Gatorade to the beer. The study also found that those men who come from families with a history of alcoholism had a greater dopamine response than those who did not.
“We believe this is the first experiment in humans to show that the taste of an alcoholic drink alone, without any intoxicating effect from the alcohol, can elicit this dopamine activity in the brain’s reward centers,” the study’s senior author, neuroscientist David Kareken of the Indiana University School of Medicine, said in a statement. The findings were detailed online on April 15 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
This is the first study to measure the impact of beer without the influence of alcohol. The link between dopamine and beer may provide helping former alcoholics from relapsing.
The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacolog.
On The Web:
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/beer-taste-triggers-brain-reward-chemical/story-e6frfkui-1226621190469