Drinking Alcohol Can Prevent You From Getting Sick?
Some of you may’ve read that title as ‘here’s how to drink your face off and avoid the consequences’, but no this little article is a tad more noble than that. A college (of all places) decided to get 12 monkeys together (no, not figurative speech for people), vaccinated them against smallpox and divide them into two groups, the party cage and the sober cage. Here’s what happened.
For 14 months the researchers put alcohol in the party cage that the monkeys could drink at whatever pace they wanted along with of course their regular food and water rations, and in the other unfortunate cage got sugar-laced H2O instead of ‘fire water’. (Hey Kool-aid???) Over the course of the study the researchers weren’t surprised to learn that the sloshed monkeys’ bodies didn’t fair all that well to ward off infection, but what did surprise them was that the primates that drank in moderation sported more ENHANCED immune systems than even their alcohol-starved counterparts.
Now, yes these are MONKEYS but in many ways monkeys don’t differ from us all that much (joke) and these little guys were chosen for the study because of how similar their immune systems are to ours, not for their crazy human-like antics. So, next time you reach for that wine glass or beer bottle, think of it’s ‘medicinal’ qualities and how much better it tastes than downing a bottle of cough syrup. Sometimes.