Just the taste of beer is enough to make you feel good, says study

Coming home from a long day at work, sometimes there's nothing better than sitting down and enjoying a nice refreshing glass of beer. According to new study, the pleasure you get from that beer, specifically the rush of dopamine in your brain, may be as much from the taste as it is from the alcohol content.

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The researchers scanned the brains of 49 men while they were given small amounts of their favourite beer (just enough to taste it), as well as water and Gatorade. Even though the men reported that the Gatorade tasted the best of the three options, the brain scans showed that the release of dopamine, a chemical associated pleasure and reward, was highest when the men sampled the beer. The participants also reported cravings for beer after tasting it, but did not have similar cravings for the water or Gatorade.

"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," said Dr. David Kareken, the deputy director of the Indiana Alcohol Research Center and lead author of the research paper, according to a statement.

The study also noted a higher dopamine response in those men who reported having a history of alcoholism in their family, supporting the idea that alcoholism may be hereditary. The increased craving for beer experienced by the participants also supports research that factors closely associated with alcohol consumption (the smell of it, taste of it or even the sight of it) can cause cravings and relapses in recovering alcoholics.

Dopamine has long been linked to addictive behaviour, especially in those that suffer from low-dopamine levels as a result of genetics. These low-dopamine levels can cause a predisposition towards addiction, although, as the video states, they don't necessarily predict it, as environmental factors also play a large role.

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The study was published on Monday, April 15th, in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

(Video courtesy: Newsy/Newslook)

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