Walk, drink, live

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on January 25, 2008
Filed Under General

We all know that exercise and a little alcohol is good for the heart. What we don’t know is whether one of these two factors may compensate for the other, or whether both of them are equally important. That is, can you skip the exercise and just do the drinking? Or, can you skip the drinking, and just do the exercise? Now, a longitudinal study shines some light on these perplexing dilemmas.

The study, published in the European Heart Journal, shows that people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol and are physically active have a lower risk of death from heart disease and other causes than people who don’t drink at all.

In addition, people who neither drink alcohol nor exercise have a thirty to forty percent higher risk of heart disease than those who either drink, exercise, or do both.

The study, conducted by a team of Danish researchers, is said to be the first to look at the combined influence of leisure-time physical activity and weekly alcohol intake on the risk of fatal heart disease and deaths from all causes.

They examined data on 11,914 Danish men and women aged twenty years or more and without heart disease at baseline who were part of the Copenhagen City Heart Study.

Physical activity was divided into three categories:

Inactive
Low level of activity â€” light physical activity for two to four hours a week (walking, cycling, light gardening, light physical exercise)
Moderate to high level of activity â€” light physical activity for more than four hours a week or more vigorous activity for two or more hours a week.

Alcohol intake was classified as:

Non-drinkers â€” less than one drink a week
Moderate drinkers â€” one to fourteen drinks a week
Heavy drinkers â€” fifteen or more drinks a week.

During the twenty years of follow-up and within both genders, being physically active was associated with lower risks of both fatal heart disease and all-cause mortality. Further, weekly alcohol intake was inversely associated with fatal heart disease and had a U-shaped association with all-cause mortality.

Within each level of physical activity, non-drinkers had the highest risk of fatal heart disease, whereas both non-drinkers and heavy drinkers had the highest risk of all-cause mortality. Further, the physically inactive had the highest risk of both fatal heart disease and all-cause mortality within each category of weekly alcohol intake.

Lead author Dr Jane Ã˜stergaard Pedersen commented: “Another important finding is that physical activity can reverse some of the adverse health effects associated with alcohol abstention. People who did not drink but whose physical activity was moderate or high had a lower risk of heart disease than the inactive non-drinkers.”

Pedersen added: “The lowest risk of death from all causes was observed among the physically active moderate drinkers and the highest risk as seen among the physically inactive non- and heavy drinkers. Thus, both moderate to high levels of physical activity and a moderate alcohol intake are important for lowering the risk of fatal heart disease and deaths from all causes.”