Guinness Is Healthier Than Your Light Beer

Beers marked "light" and "low carb" often taste empty, bland, and (let's face it) sad. There's nothing more depressing than watching your friends down thick, rich brews of their favorite beers while you're silently sipping a watery can of diet-friendly Bud Light.

Bud Light, often touted as the cheap beer of choice for avoiding a beer gut while you watch the big game, has around 145 calories per pint and an impressively low 6 grams of carbs. It's made primarily from barley and rice and, to everyone's dismay, tastes mildly awful (an opinion shared by most beer-reviewing experts).

But thankfully, healthy drinking doesn't have to taste so bad. Your quest for healthier beer was just misled somewhere along the way, and it took you far down a road of lower calorie and less delicious brews. Meanwhile flavorful and robust Guinness Draught was waiting on tap for you — health benefits and all — the whole time.

The classic slogan, "Guinness is Good for You" might actually have some truth to it, after all.

You see, Guinness contains approximately 166 calories per pint. That's 20 measly calories more than the empty-tasting swill of light beer. Sure, the can contains 10 grams of carbs as opposed to the six in Bud Light beer, but that's largely due to the heavy concentration of roasted barley used in its brewing process. Less water and more healthy complex carbohydrates are in this dark Irish concoction than the simple-carbohydrate-packed, rice-infused Bud Light. And as a result, more nutritional benefit is waiting inside of each serving, too.

The nutrients provided by Guinness Draught don't end at complex carbs. It also contains more folate, a nutrient we need to make DNA and other genetic material, than any other beer. Additionally, like Charlie Bamforth, a professor of brewing sciences at the University of California, told CNN, "Because Guinness contains a lot of unmalted barley, which contains more fiber than malted grain, it is also one of the beers with the highest levels of fiber." Bud Light and most other light beers, however, don't contain any.

The alcohol content is lower in Guinness Draught than in many other beers — but that makes it healthier, too. Alcohol has the potential to lower your metabolism by up to 73 percent. So by drinking a beer with lower alcohol by volume, you're sparing your metabolism some struggle.

We recommend you swap out your "healthier" brew of beer (which we doubt you genuinely enjoy as much as the others) for a Guinness. You'll leave the bar feeling more satisfied and you even might enjoy your drinking experience, without severely sabotaging your health.