A curious flurry of headlines in praise of beer appeared this week:
Beer really DOES make you happier! Key molecule boosts brain’s reward centreDrinking Beer Makes You Really Happy, Confirms Awesome New StudyDrinking beer can make you happy, researchers claim
It was reported that scientists from Germany have discovered that a molecule in beer called hordenine activates dopamine receptors in the brain, and thus produces a positive mood. The research in question was published back in March of this year, so I'm not sure why it only made the headlines this week - maybe Oktoberfest had something to do with it. Either way, the study did indeed find that hordenine is a dopamine D2 receptor agonist, but it's not clear this has any relevance to beer drinkers.
The German researchers, Sommer et al., are chemists, not neuroscientists. They used computational simulations to model whether 13,000 known 'food-derived' molecules would bind ...
