Hops Could Help You Fight Breast Cancer

Everybody's favourite diuretic, sleep-inducer, and source of estrogen is also what makes beer taste amazing and refreshing. Hops have long been thought to possess medicinal properties by herbalists, and now modern medicine is catching up.

It turns out that the beautiful green buds which impart magical bitterness upon your beer may even help combat breast cancer. Because of the well-documented link between hops and estrogen—the same reason why IPA can give men man boobs—it's not a stretch to suggest that the very same flower can have an impact on woman boobs.

According to a recent study by the American Chemical Society (ACS), an extract from the plant could "help fend off breast cancer," especially for women undergoing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) during menopause.

HRT is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer and heart disease, which has led some women to use hops, which contain protective phytoestrogens, as an herbal defence against the hormonal imbalance brought on by the menopause treatment.

By building on this knowledge, a team of ACS scientists have already generated some hopeful preliminary results. Specifically, by making an enriched hop extract, scientists were able to look at its effect on estrogen metabolism, a process crucial to the the development of breast cancer. The researchers then applied the extract to two different breast cell lines in order to measure how they affected estrogen metabolism.

Sure enough, they yielded some pretty hopeful results. "One particular hops compound called 6-prenylnaringenin, or 6-PN, boosted the cells' detoxification pathway that studies have associated with a lower risk for breast cancer. Thus the results suggest that 6-PN could have anti-cancer effects, although more studies would be needed to further investigate this possibility," the authors of the study said in a press statement.

With breast cancer affecting some 246,660 American women and 2,600 men every year, this is good news for beer drinkers of all genders. Never lose hops.