Here are the many benefits of exercise for drinkers, cancer and heart disease patients

Consistent exercise has many benefits of offsetting the harms of alcohol including cancer and heart-related diseases, according to experts. Regular drinkers who exercise for an hour daily are more likely to live longer than teetotalers, because exercise works against many harmful processes which occur in the body after drinking alcohol. The harmful process includes inflammation of the cells and a rise in certain hormone levels, which trigger cancer and other illnesses.

Researchers at University College London and the University of Sydney found further evidence of the enormous health benefits of exercise. A survey this summer found that an hour’s exercise a day offsets the harms of a nine to five office life.

A similar healthy study by British Journal of Sports Medicine examined data from 36,370 adults in England and Scotland supports the claim. It focused on weekly consumption and exercise from 1994 to 2006. About 85 percent drank rarely, they included 13 percent who exceeded the recommended safe limit of 14 units a week. Those who did at least two and a half hour moderate exercise per week significantly reduced the risk of drinking. This way, the more you exceed the safe drinking levels, managed with at least five hours exercise a week, it makes drinking the harm-free, and you are more likely to live longer than teetotallers.

This is the conclusion of the study: ‘Meeting the current physical activity public health recommendations (two and a half hours) offsets some of the cancer and all-cause mortality risk associated with alcohol drinking. Our results provide an additional argument for the role of physical activity as a means to promote the health of the population even in the presence of other less healthy behaviours.’

Likewise, Professor Matt Field from the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Liverpool said: ‘This is a rigorous piece of research with some clear conclusions.

‘The relationship between drinking alcohol to excess and increased risk of death is significantly weaker in people who are physically active. Therefore, it appears that physical activity may partially offset some of the harmful effects of drinking, particularly alcohol-attributable cancers.’