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Wine
drinkers buy healthier food
Beer Drinkers' Shopping Carts: Fewer Veggies,
More Chips and Sugar
By
Miranda Hitti
WebMD Medical News
|
If there's a wine bottle in your grocery cart, you're
probably buying healthier foods than your fellow
shoppers who are buying beer.
So say researchers who peeked at the purchases of Danish
grocery shoppers. Their findings:
People who bought wine bought more olives, fruit,
vegetables, poultry, cooking oil, and low-fat cheese,
milk, and meat.
Beer buyers bought more prepared dishes, sugar, cold
cuts, chips, pork, butter or margarine, sausages, lamb,
and soft drinks.
"Wine buyers made more
purchases of healthy food items than people who buy
beer," states the study in
BMJ Online First.
Shoppers' Habits Studied
Morten Gronbaek, MD, PhD, DrMedSci, was one of the
researchers. He's a professor at the Centre for Alcohol
Research, which is part of Denmark's National Institute
of Public Health.
Gronbaek and colleagues didn't hover over shoppers'
shoulders or lurk outside grocery stores to peek into
shopping carts. Instead, they got data from two large
Danish chains of grocery stores on about 3.5 million
purchases made over six months.
People don't always accurately report what they eat and
drink, so the researchers write that shoppers' purchases
might be a better clue about their food and alcohol
habits.
Wine Drinkers vs. Beer Drinkers
Wine drinkers and beer drinkers have been compared
before. Here's how they stacked up in a handful of
French, Danish, and U.S. studies cited by Gronbaek's
team:
Wine drinkers: Higher income, higher education level,
healthier, leaner, and more likely to be young or
middle-aged women who drink moderately.
Beer drinkers: Less educated and more likely to be
healthy young men who drink more alcohol.
Of course, those are broad findings, not facts that
describe everyone.
Gronbaek and colleagues didn't have the shoppers' names.
They don't know who ate and drank the purchased goods,
or if the shoppers also bought food or drinks at other
stores.
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