Nutritionist and professor of Human Nutrition at University of Ibadan Oyo State, Professor Tola Atinmo has stated that people suffering lower abdominal obesity (also known as pot or ‘beer’ belly) should blame other attitudes in their lives than drinking for their predicament.
Prof. Atinmo made this known while presenting a paper titled: Beer As Part of A Healthy Lifestyle at the First Nigerian Symposium on Beer and Health which held in Lagos recently.
Against longstanding beliefs that beer contains chemicals and is injurious to health and do not go well with food as against alcoholic beverages like wine, Professor Atinmo stated that beer is made from four natural ingredients – water, barley, hops and yeast and ranks as one of the world’s healthiest drinks ever.
Much in line with the Editor of Harvard Men’s Health Watch, Harvey B. Simon’s, reply to a young man’s eagerness to know if beer is really responsible for his ‘Pot belly’?”, Prof. Atinmo stated that beer cannot be blamed for pot bellies.
While it is common for people to describe fat bellies as “beer bellies, empirical researches have proved beer is not to be blamed for it.
Citing empirical research findings and reports, Prof. Atinmo unearthed numerous health benefits derivable from moderate consumption of the beverage adding that beer seems to play no role in the so-called ‘beer belly’ and is no potential obesogen, neither in men nor in women.
The question is, if it’s not beer, what is to blame? The culprit, according to health and nutrition experts, is calories. Several reports posit that if you take in more calories with food and drink than you burn up with exercise, you’ll store the excess energy in fat cells. And unfortunately for men, their abdominal fat cells seem to enlarge more readily than the abdominal fat cells in women.
