Fifty Spanish nuns drank half a litre of beer for forty-five consecutive days, followed six months later by ingestion of 400 milligrammes of hops. This unusual activity was part of a scientific study conducted by the Spanish Information Centre for Beer and Health. The study showed that the cholesterol count in nuns with high cholesterol levels fell six percent.

From a scientific viewpoint research with nuns has a big advantage: after entering the nunnery most aspects of their lives are identical, such as diet and health care, abstinence from sex and children. This makes them a suitable homogeneous control group for scientific research, because of the absence of a number of incidental factors that may distort in other population groups.

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