Regular drinkers get more exercise: study

Preparing for the 2012 Staggerthon.

"Drinking and exercise go hand in hand, a new study hints.

Researchers found that people who enjoy a beer or glass of wine regularly seem to exercise more often than teetotalers, and those who average more than a drink or two a day may be the most active.

Using data from a government health survey of U.S. adults, researchers found that in general, the amount of time people devoted to exercise tended to inch up along with the number of alcoholic drinks they had each month.

Compared with abstainers, those considered heavy drinkers -- at least 46 drinks in the past month for women, and 76 or more for men -- exercised for an average of 20 minutes more per week.

Meanwhile, moderate drinkers -- which included women who had 15 to 45 drinks in a month, and men who had 30 to 75 -- got 10 extra minutes of exercise each week."

With a bottle of beer containing between 100 and 200 Calories and a glass of wine containing between 62 - 160 Calories, let's do the math.

For heavy drinkers we are talking, for between 46 and 76 drinks, a range of 2,852 and 15,200 Calories (minimum).

For moderate drinkers having between 15 and 75 drinks, the Calories consumed are between 930 and 15,000.

Those are per month.

In a year the range for moderate to heavy is from 11,160 and 182,400.

The extra exercise drinkers stumble through is between 520 and 1040 minutes per year.

To burn off the liquid Calories, drinkers have to burn between 21.44 and 175.38 (minimum) Calories per minute at 10 - 20 minutes per week.

Good luck with that.