At least according to a 20 year study of 12,000 people. The Denmark study, as published in Time Magazine, found that exercise and drinking alcohol each independently benefited the heart but even more so when practiced together. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you don’t want to exercise too much,” asks Dr. Morten Gronbaek, epidemiologist with Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health, “can you trade it for one to two drinks per day and be fine?” A study Gronbaek and colleagues just published in the European Heart Journal suggests the answer just may be yes. That finding, not surprisingly, has proved to be a crowd-pleaser.

There are a number of reasons a drink can be such a tonic. First, alcohol and exercise affect your heart health in similar ways. “They help increase good cholesterol, or HDL [high-density lipoproteins], and clean the circulatory system’s pipes,” says Dr. Arthur Klatsky, a cardiologist and researcher at Kaiser Permanente Northern California. “HDL helps remove fatty deposits, created by bad cholesterol, or LDL [low-density lipoproteins], from blood-vessel walls. The higher the HDL, the less likely vascular disease becomes. The lower the HDL, the more likely.”

Interesting, right? I don’t know if this post is license to overindulge but it is worth looking into if you, like me, feel the need for a glass of wine every now and then.

You can read the entire article here.


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