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Hops do more than just add flavor — mice who drank hoppy beer experienced fewer damaging effects on the liver.

Hops, one of the main ingredients in beer, are the flowers of the hops plant, called Humulus lupulus. Their primary purpose is to add flavor — bitter, zesty, and citric — and act as a preservative, but researchers in a new study have found that hops may have an added benefit: reducing the damaging effects of alcohol on the liver.

In the study, which appears in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism, researchers from Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany split mice into three groups: one was given regular beer with hops, one was given a special beer without hops, and a third was given plain alcohol (ethanol).

Then, 12 hours later, the team studied the mice, finding that the rodents who drank hoppy beer displayed less buildup of fat in their livers than those who drank pure alcohol. Interestingly, the mice who drank the beer without hops showed about the same level of fat buildup in their livers as the mice who drank pure alcohol.

Additionally, the researchers suggest that hops may decrease the formation of compounds called reactive oxygen species, which are known to be highly reactive and damaging to cells in the liver.

"Our data suggest that hops content in beer is at least in part responsible for the less damaging effects of beer on the liver," the researchers wrote in the study.

According to the team, these new findings may help explain why drinking hard liquor has been more strongly linked with death from liver disease than drinking beer in previous studies.

However, this research isn’t to be taken as suggesting that beer consumption doesn’t cause liver damage. Although it may cause less damage to the liver than hard liquor, it’s still an alcoholic beverage, so the risks must not be ignored.

Plus, the amount of hops can vary from beer to beer, and this study only looked at one hoppy beer. Further research is required to confirm what level of hops is needed to have its beneficial effect on the liver.

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