Why Fitter People Drink More Alcohol
My second-favorite running T-shirt quote is usually attributed to the versatile New Zealander Rod Dixon, whose range stretched from an Olympic medal in the 1,500 meters to a New York City Marathon victory: “All I want to do,” he said, “is drink beer and train like an animal.” (My favorite is from Noureddine Morceli: “When I race, my mind is full of doubts. Who will finish second? Who will finish third?”) I don’t even like beer all that much, but there’s something appealing in the simple clarity of Dixon’s ambitions—something, it turns out, that seems to resonate with a lot of runners.
Many different studies over the years have concluded that people who exercise a lot also tend to drink more. This is mildly surprising, because in general healthy or unhealthy behaviors tend to cluster together: exercise buffs are less likely to smoke but more likely to eat a lot of kale, for example. Admittedly, alcohol is tricky to slot into the “healthy” or “unhealthy” category because there’s (much debated) evidence that light or even moderate drinking may confer some health benefits. But I don’t think Dixon’s taste for beer was driven by a desire to lower his blood pressure.
A study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, from a research team at the Cooper Institute in Dallas, offers a new perspective on the exercise-alcohol link. Many of the previous studies have focused on competitive athletes, particularly on college teams, where high levels of alcohol consumption may reflect frat-like social pressures rather than an intrinsic desire to drink. But the new study looks instead at data from 38,000 healthy patients ranging in age from 20 to 86 who underwent preventive testing at the Cooper Clinic—and it too finds a strong link between exercise and alcohol habits.
