11 April 2013

Drinking boosts unhealthy food binges

Americans tend to eat more kilojoules and fat on the days they also have alcoholic drinks, a new study suggests.


Americans tend to eat more kilojoules and fat on the days they also have alcoholic drinks, a new study suggests. "Food choices changed on the days that people drank... and changed in an unhealthier direction for both men and women," said Rosalind Breslow, a nutritional epidemiologist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the lead author of the study.


Participants filled out what they eat

The data came from a large US health and lifestyle survey conducted in 2003 through 2008.More than 1 800 people answered a diet questionnaire on two days within a 10-day span - one day when they drank and another when they did not. When people did imbibe, they had an average of two to three alcoholic beverages at a time, most commonly beer and wine.

Breslow's team found that on non-alcohol days, men in the study ate about 10 080 kilojoules, based on their diet reports, and women consumed 7140 kilojoules, on average. When they also drank, men took in about 1680 more daily kilojoules and women about 1260 more.

For women, the extra kilojoules could be explained by the alcohol alone - but for men, between 420 and 840 were from food. The types of food people ate - not just how much - changed on the days they drank as well. For example, men and women both ate about nine percent more fat when they drank alcohol, the researchers reported in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Men consumed more white potatoes  

Men reported eating more white potatoes and meat on their drinking days and both men and women drank less milk. "Why that's happening, it's very hard to speculate based on this," said Dr Suthat Liangpunsakul, who studies alcohol consumption at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis and was not involved in the study.

Breslow said there are a number of possible explanations. It could be that social events that involve drinking often also involve less-healthy foods, or that people are more impulsive when they drink and don't stop themselves from indulging.


The researchers don't know how people ate on the other days of the week, she pointed out, and they might have been compensating for their poor eating habits on drinking days. Liangpunsakul agreed that it's difficult to determine just how important less-healthy diets on drinking days might be to people's health."We don't know if it will (influence) obesity or weight changes," he said.

Breslow said people should be aware that alcoholic beverages add calories and be mindful of how they eat when they drink alcohol, focusing on whole grains, healthy oils and vegetables. And, she added, people should drink in moderation. Current federal guidelines recommend women drink no more than one alcoholic beverage each day and men no more than two.


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