Looking for an excuse for your rampant alcoholism? How about cancer prevention: A new study released by the German Cancer Research Center says that a chemical in hops, the flavoring ingredient in beer, may block testosterone, making you less susceptible to catching prostate cancer. Hooray beer, indeed.

The leading scientist in the groundbreaking research

An ingredient of beer may someday help ward off prostate cancer, new animal experiments suggest.

The compound in question, xanthohumol, is found in hops — the bitter flavoring agent in beer — and is known to block the male hormone testosterone, which plays a role in the development of prostate cancer.

“We hope that one day we can demonstrate that xanthohumol prevents prostate cancer development, first in animal models and then in humans, but we are just at the beginning,” said lead researcher Clarissa Gerhauser, group leader of cancer chemoprevention in the division of epigenomics and cancer risk factors at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.

But don’t get your hopes all the way up. The American Cancer Society’s director of prostate and colorectal cancer Dr. Durado Brooks isn’t sold, saying that if the correlation between beer and lowered instances of prostate cancer were true, we would already see lower instances of cancer. Particularly in Boston.

Drinking a lot of beer is “not one of the things we recommend,” Brooks said.

Talk of a correlation between hooking up with heavyset women while sloppily drunk and a decrease in instances of testicular cancer is as of yet unfounded, despite all of our pleas.

[USA Today]