Tie-in between exercise and beer! It’s further proof there is a God!

Yup. Explains why rugby players live a long time.  And why Pope Benedict is 89 years old.

Two careful studies – one of them involving animals –

Now two new studies suggest that exercise may well influence when and how much people drink. Drinking may even affect whether people exercise, and, the findings suggest, the interplay between exercise and alcohol could be a good thing.

Past epidemiological studies have shown that people who exercise tend numerically also to be people who drink, and vice versa. In a typical study from 2001, for example, researchers found that men and women who qualified as moderate drinkers, meaning they downed about a drink a day, were twice as likely to exercise regularly as teetotalers.

But most of these previous studies had limitations.

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So to better untangle the relationship between drinking and sweating, researchers at Pennsylvania State University, in the most scientifically ambitious of the new studies, turned to a representative group of 150 adult men and women age 18 to 75 who already were enrolled in an ongoing, long-term health study at the university.

They asked these volunteers to visit the lab and fill out extensive questionnaires about their lifestyles, and then provided each of them with a simple smartphone app that could be used to record a day’s drinking and exercise activities. The app would automatically send each day’s report to the scientists.

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When the researchers collated and compared the data from their volunteers, they found, for the first time, an unequivocal correlation between exercising on any given day and subsequently drinking, especially if someone exercised more than usual. As the scientists write in their study, which was published recently in Health Psychology, “people drank more than usual on the same days that they engaged in more physical activity than usual.”

This relationship held true throughout all seasons of the year and whether someone was a man or a woman, a collegian or a retiree. Age and gender did not affect the results.

Thankfully, the data did not show that exercise incited or exacerbated problem drinking. …

Hit the link for the rest of the story, including the animal study.