It’s long been said that drinking a beer a day can have some health benefits, but now a new study is clearly stating that it may reduce your risk of stroke and heart disease.

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The study tracked 80,000 adults over a six year period, examining their drinking habits, cholesterol levels and general health and wellbeing. It concluded that if you drank moderate levels of alcohol on a fairly regular basis, than you were more likely to have good cholesterol than people that abstained completely.

However, this obviously doesn’t mean that you can just get drunk every day for the rest of your life and you’ll never have a stroke or heart disease. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even really get drunk as two pints for men and one pint for women was found to be the optimal daily intake.

If you’re following these guidelines then you’ll produce more HDL – which is known as ‘good cholesterol’ rather than ‘bad cholesterol’ – and this will stop the ‘bad cholesterol’ from building up around your heart. This means the flow of blood to your heart isn’t as restricted as you grow older and the decline of your HDL levels is much slower.

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Beer was also found to be the best form of alcoholic beverage to generate this result with your cholesterol, but yeah, the key part really is in moderation. Everything in moderation unfortunately as if you drank more than the optimal level then it wouldn’t be good for your cholesterol either.

Still, I suppose that’s better than nothing, but I can’t see many people I know just enjoying one pint down the boozer after work or on the weekend. Just doesn’t happen.

However, another study found that drinking beer could be the key to losing weight, so maybe if you combine the two ideas then it’s an excuse to get a few more pints in? Probably not, but hey you can pretend I suppose.