OK, so here’s a quick quiz …
If you exercise, would you be more inclined or less inclined to drink?
Your answer might be that you’d be less inclined to want to drink, based on the reasoning that if you do something as healthy as exercising, the rest of your lifestyle choices might be similarly healthful.
However, according to an article in The New York Times, recent scientific studies yield some rather surprising results which indicate that the more you exercise, the more likely you are to drink.
An excerpt of the article is below; to read the entire piece, please click the link in the title:
Does Exercising Make You Drink More Alcohol?
… researchers used adult male rats with an inbred taste for alcohol. Half of the rats were given access to running wheels for three weeks. The others were kept in cages without wheels. After three weeks, the running wheels were removed, and half of the animals from each group were allowed unlimited access to alcohol for 21 days. Earlier studies by other researchers found that animals given equal access to exercise and alcohol — they were allowed to sip booze while on a running wheel — chose to drink less than animals not exercising. Based on those results, “we had anticipated that exercise would reduce” the rats’ drive to drink, said J. Leigh Leasure, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Houston and senior author of the study, which was presented in November at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. Instead, the exercising animals turned to alcohol with significantly more enthusiasm than the sedentary rats, mainly during the first week of the experiment. “It was a bit of surprise,” Dr. Leasure said.