Mickey Mouse Club Cocktail

Maybe it's due to my epic New Years trip to The Big Apple, but The Real Fitness Nerd is feeling a lot of love for The New York Times lately, particularly their Well blog.

Today, I'd like to share with y'all a recent post regarding exercise and alcohol - two of the four activities that played large roles in my recent trip, so I can understand why the Gray Lady would be an authority on both. (For the record, activity #3 was gluttonous eating and #4 is none of your damn business.)

Anyway, the post looks at a recent study presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience showing that rats who exercised more also tended to drink more alcohol.

For the experiment, researchers used adult male rats with an inbred taste for alcohol. Half of the rats were given access to running wheels for three weeks. The others were kept in cages without wheels. After three weeks, the running wheels were removed, and half of the animals from each group were allowed unlimited access to alcohol for 21 days. Earlier studies by other researchers found that animals given equal access to exercise and alcohol — they were allowed to sip booze while on a running wheel — chose to drink less than animals not exercising. Based on those results, “we had anticipated that exercise would reduce” the rats’ drive to drink, said J. Leigh Leasure, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Houston and senior author of the study, which was presented in November at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. Instead, the exercising animals turned to alcohol with significantly more enthusiasm than the sedentary rats, mainly during the first week of the experiment. “It was a bit of surprise,” Dr. Leasure said.

The article then mentions other recent research showing that humans tend to do the same thing. I remember this research when it came out and I'm a little surprised that I didn't blog about it. (Bad Real Fitness Nerd!) Humans are neurotic goofballs, so it would be easy to hypothesize that exercisers feel they're doing their bodies right, so they should be allowed to poison themselves a bit more. Or maybe it's the fact that young people tend to exercise more than us oldies and are also more prone to ply their bodies with toxins, given they're immortal and all. There's also the whole "sensation lifestyle" thing, where some people just like to live life hard and experience things.

But the rats add a whole new twist to it. Rodents aren't neurotic, self destructive, or into extreme sports. Even the cartoon ones tend to be well-balanced. Think about it. Mickey, Jerry, Mighty, Speedy Gonzales, they all have fine outlooks on life, so the alcohol/exercise connection must be something a little more physical.

The New York Times post suggests several options, including the idea that exercise and alcohol hit the same pleasure centers in the brain, so we might tend to use one in the absence of the other. It also cites a study showing that exercise wards off the cell death caused by binge drinking, but I don't think the rats have read this study (yet), so that can't be it either.

Whatever the truth is, it brings up the philosophy that Steve Edwards and I tend to espouse about alcohol and caffeine. Bad for you in excess, but a little might be a good thing. This feels a lot like a biological lesson indicating that.

At least, that's what the rats want us to think.

image: Spreadshirt.com