As college students drinking alcohol is a very common thing. Because of this, it is likely that people can develop the “beer belly” and gain weight in other areas because of excessive drinking. One of the questions that researchers have been curious is about is whether or not the amount of beer you drink effects how much you exercise and if how much you exercise effects how much beer you drink. According to two new studies, “the interplay between exercise and alcohol could be a good thing” (New York Times).

Past studies have shown that men and women who are considered moderate drinkers (drink about 1- 2 drinks a day), were twice as likely to exercise regularly. However, these studies relied on  peoples ability to recall their exercise and drinking habits. Also the studies did not determine whether people’s exercise and drinking tended to go hand in hand, meaning that someone could have worked out on a Thursday and then drank with friends on Friday night. There is no obvious connection between the two.

Penn State University researchers decided to determine whether beer and exercise really go hand in hand. The study was conducted of 150 adult men and women age 18 to 75 who were  already enrolled in an ongoing, long-term health study at Penn State. They asked volunteers to fill out extensive questionnaire about their lifestyles  and then provided them with an smartphone app to record their drink intake and exercise. At the end of the day, the app would automatically send the scientists the report from each participant.

The app was used for a consecutive 21 days over a course of a year, covering different seasons. The participants submitted three of these 21 day reports. One question I have is whether or no people actually used the app every day or could they have possibly made their activity up before the record got sent to the researchers. If this happened, it could have skewed the results.

Once all the data was in, the researchers discovered that there was an unmistakable correlation between exercising on any given day and drinking. The scientist wrote, “people drank more than usual on the same days that they engaged in more physical activity than usual” (New York Times). This relationship remained true through out all the seasons of the year, regardless of gender or age. The data also did not show any one obsessively drinking (for women that means 4 or more drinks in succession and for men 5 or more drinks).

However, this study cannot determine why working out and drinking should be associated which makes this second study very interesting to researchers. According to the study published in Frontiers of Psychiatry, lab rats that both exercise and alcohol have been shown to increase activity in parts of the brain related to reward processing. Though the lab rats responded similarly to exercise and alcohol it is not identical. “There are aspects of reward processing related to exercise that differ from reward processing related to drinking, and those differences may help to explain why, if given the opportunity, animals will avidly engage in both running and ethanol sipping” (New York Times). The neural high seems to be more prominent  when the two are paired together rather then when they are separate.

According to  J. Leigh Leasure, an associate professor at the University of Houston, “Feeling a slight buzz after a workout, she said, we may, without overt volition, look to extend and intensify that feeling with a beer, a glass of wine or a cocktail” (New York Times). However, humans and rodents are different so it is possible that we may conjoin drinking and alcohol for many different reasons. Many people exercise after they drink to burn off all of the calories. In addition, drinking and exercising could be seen as social activities.

Though there is evidence that drinking and exercise go hand in hand, “it does not indicate that this relationship is necessarily worrisome for the vast majority of us,” according to Dr. Leasure. (New York Times). I personally believe that exercising causes people to drink because they assume since they exercised they can consume extra calories and vice versa. One of the things I find interesting was that in the study done at Penn State, that it did not matter what whether you were male or female or what age you were alcohol and exercise went hand in hand.