Media Claims "A Glass Of Wine Is As Good As 1 Hour Of Exercise"?? • Russ Howe PTI

No, you didn’t mis-read the title of this article.

News outlets really are reporting that drinking a glass of red wine is as good for your body as one hour of exercise in the gym (link, link, link, link).

Honestly, how did we get here as a society?

Anyway, they are citing the results of a study which was published in the Journal of Physiology back in 2012 but, the media being the cock-taboggans they are, have decided to twist the researchers’ findings in order to create sensationalist, attention-grabbing headlines rather than presenting you with the truth.

Let’s break it all down.

What Did The Study Actually Discover?

Back in 2012, a team of researchers from the University of Alberta, Canada, set out to discover whether a compound called resveratrol holds any potential fat burning benefits. (1)

They set up a 12-week study in which a group of rats (nope, not humans!) were divided into the following test groups:

Group A: No exercise + No resveratrol
Group B: No exercise + Resveratrol
Group C: Exercise + No resveratrol
Group D: Exercise + Resveratrol

If you take a look below, you can see that at the end of the 12-weeks they noticed that the group who exercised and had resveratrol saw the best results.

However, that’s not what the media reported at all…

… yes, it took them about 0.1 seconds to notice that resveratrol appears to improve results (even if only slightly), and the fact that it’s found in red wine prompted them to start telling their audience to get fucked up instead of going to the gym!

This version of the multiverse is nuts, huh?

Anyway, the researchers did discover that resveratrol appears to give us a slight edge in terms of fat loss, but we must remember that this was not a human trial, and we must also consider that the dose used in this study would be fucking lethal to a human being.

You see, each rodent received a resveratrol dose of 322mg/kg, and when we recalculate that to the size of a human it becomes 53mg/kg.

That means a woman who weighs 59kg would need a staggering 3127mg resveratrol to achieve the same dose as the rats in this trial, and a man weighing 80kg would need a monstrous 4240mg. Considering a glass of red wine contains only 4-7mg resveratrol, the lady would need to drink anywhere between 446-781 glasses of red wine and the man would need to drink 605-1060 glasses of red wine.

Holy flaps!

So while it appears resveratrol may offer us some interesting fat loss benefits, they are nowhere near the level which can achieve via exercise and there appears to be no way to unlock them anyway without becoming a raging alcoholic, so put these nonsensical media reports straight in the fucking bin!