Research in motion, not necessarily loose

There is no snobbery attached to drinking wine in the hinterland, because in the hinterland, wine means alcohol of any other kind than wine. So, if you walk in to the world-famous Ramesh Wine Stores in Ramesh Nagar, you may not find the produce of even Nasik vines. Sometimes all you will get is warm beer named Upwards 5,000. This is branding based on the degree of potency. That’s better than something called ‘inflation’ because when inflation one goes up, the potency of your rupee goes down. But the potency of beer may go up to a million, which is lovingly called Country for its power to invoke nationalistic slogans like, ‘I love my Country because my Country uh… because my Country hic… hic… allows me to cheat on my wife’.

So, 75 per cent of drinking Indians drink wine without knowing it’s not wine. The other 25 per cent know what wine is, but seldom drink it because they think rum is superior to any other form of alcohol. There are obviously some whisky drinkers among us who mistake a light-coloured rum bottled as whisky. They don’t mind this as much they mind this axiom from an old monk who still owns a Ferrari: “Rum is the essence of soul of humanity, everything else is just alcohol.”

The few people who drink wine knowing it’s wine were shattered by this piece of news in yesterday’s papers: Researchers at the University of Gottingen in Germany have found that drinking wine damages the brain more than beer or spirits (spooky). So while the discerning minority like you and yours truly may think they are discerning enough to choose wine over other forms of stinking ale, they may end up as less discerning folks than beer drinkers, who are often referred to as lager louts just because they lack in gray matter between the ears. But wine actually shrinks the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory. According to the new study, the average size of the hippocampus — one of the first brain areas to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease — in non-alcoholics is 3.85ml while in beer drinkers it is 3.4ml, but for wine drinkers it is only 2.8ml.

That brings us to the last study done by academics at University College London. They found that those who even drink only one glass of wine a week have significantly sharper thought processes than teetotallers. the good, the bad, the ugly The Whitehall Study was published in August last year. So, in less than a year, wine has gone from good to bad for your brain, which is anyway better than having bad cholesterol. The only thing worse than bad cholesterol is…

RESEARCH
Research tells us that our nails are not really dead cells and long hair is bad for your sex life, not mine. Research that does not confirm that common cold is a form of nasal dysentery. By the way, no researcher can say anything about common cold with finality. It’s so common that no body has any time to research such minor ailments like cancer.

The scientific community is busy finding out that chocolate is bad for your health soon after saying it’s the best thing ever happened to your sex life, if you are into melting chocolate onto private parts. Going out in the sun will inflict you with skin cancer so you must apply a lot of sunscreen lotion, some of which may cause skin cancer, which is not a form of nasal dysentery. Skin cancer has no relation with dysentery of any kind. However, research may soon find one. end of the affair Drinking milk has close links with dysentery, but doctors say it is good for your bones, a finding quite contrary to the one which said your bones will be brittle if you drink milk or use toothpaste regularly. Some toothpaste brands contain fluoride which is bad for your teeth.

There is no research linking reading to needing angioplasty yet, so you can safely turn the page and continue reading, while I go pour my fourth glass of wine and wet the hippocampus, the area of the brain where a hippopotamus swims in beer.

That takes us back to the study by the University of Gottingen (Germany) researchers. In their study, they also found that beer drinkers had the lowest levels of a compound in the blood called homocysteine which is often linked to heart diseases and strokes. It is relevant to mention here that homocysteine is found in all homos (homo sapiens or humans) and not only homos, the euphemism for homosexuals.