Healthy Beer, or Foamy Hype?

Three underage college students are getting lots of attention for their genetically engineered beer, Biobeer, which includes genes from a compound in red wine that some researchers believe has beneficial health effects.

There is little doubt that the compound, resveratrol, is good for you. It's an antioxidant, and there are some indications that it might help prevent heart disease and cancer and may even stave off aging and help people lose weight.

But how much effect resveratrol has in any of those cases is still unknown. It's not even clear that it's what makes red wine apparently so healthy.

Nonetheless, the students, undergrads in bioengineering at Rice University, believe that adding the compound to beer will mean more people will consume it, and, presumably, be healthier.

"Especially in this country, beer consumption far outstrips wine consumption," said one of the students, Thomas Shapiro, in an interview with National Public Radio. "And since wine is implicated in having a lot of very beneficial effects on people's health—such as being anti-cancer, possibly good for cardiac health—if we can put these effects into beer, those benefits can be seen by a very wide range of Americans."

Beyond the fact that one of the wine genes, according to Shapiro, "gives beer a kind of floral and honeylike aroma and taste," the stuff can't hurt.