Drinkers aren’t just bending their elbows: In fact, the more alcohol people drink, the more likely they might be to exercise, according to a new study.
“Alcohol users not only exercised more than abstainers, but the differential actually increased with more drinking,” said lead author Michael French. “There is a strong association between all levels of drinking and both moderate and vigorous physical activity. However, these results do not suggest that people should use alcohol to boost their exercise programs, as the study was not designed to determine whether alcohol intake actually caused an increase in exercise.”
French, a health economics professor at the University of Miami, and colleagues analyzed data from the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a yearly telephone survey of roughly 230,000 Americans.
They uncovered a strong statistical association between measures of both alcohol use and moderate to vigorous exercise, according to their findings, which appears in the September/October issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion.
Among women, those using alcohol now exercised 7.2 minutes more per week than those who abstained. Relative to abstainers, the more alcohol used, the longer the person exercised. Specifically, light, moderate, and heavy drinkers exercised 5.7, 10.1, and 19.9 minutes more per week. Overall, drinking was associated with a 10.1 percent increase in the probability of engaging in vigorous physical activity. The results for men were similar.
To Bethany Garrity, corporate fitness director at the National Institute for Fitness and Sport in Indianapolis, these results challenge the status quo assumption that healthy people make all the right choices.
“We don’t often associate an unhealthy behavior such as moderate to heavy drinking with healthy behaviors in the same individual,” she said. “Sometimes people tend to forget that we are not all healthy or all unhealthy in how we behave. This is a good reminder that people choose many kinds of health behaviors across the spectrum from healthiest to unhealthy.”
