A new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition offers some surprising news about alcohol and the size of our waistlines.

The Danish researchers set out to see if drinking frequency -- how many days a week middle-aged adults typically have one or more alcoholic beverages -- was correlated to changes in their waist size over time.

The researchers start off by noting that frequent drinking has been linked to lower risk of heart disease, whereas binge drinking (a lot consumed in a short amount of time) had the opposite effect -- higher blood pressure, worse cholesterol levels.

Just over half the men fell into two categories: 2-4 days per week with at least one drink (36 percent of all the men in the study), and 5-6 days (17 percent). Those men averaged between 9 and 19 drinks per week. They were the least likely to be smokers and most likely to exercise.

Forty-five percent of the women fell into these two categories of drinking frequency. They averaged between 7 and 13 drinks per week. Like the men, these women were more likely to exercise than those who drink more or less often. Their smoking rates were lower than women at the two extremes (no drinking at all, or daily imbibers who average 19 drinks a week).

One interesting finding: Men and women who drink at least two days a week are unlikely to fall into the lowest education category. I don't know if that means they have higher education levels overall, but they're the least likely to have dropped out before reaching the eighth grade.

The real highlights of the study are these findings:

• Men and women who drank the most frequently were the least likely to make major increases in waist size during the five-year follow-up period.
• Men and women who drink the least amount of alcohol (less than one drink per week) were 12 to 15 percent more likely to develop a substantially bigger belly.
• For women, those averaging 14 to 20 drinks per week were 19 percent less likely to lose the battle of the bulge.
• For men, the best odds came at 21 to 28 drinks per week. They were 17 percent less likely to go belly-out.
• This one blew my mind: Women who drank beer seven days a week were 44 percent less likely to see a major increase in waist size. Across all frequencies of alcohol consumption, women who drank beer were less likely to put on belly fat than women who drank wine or those who showed no preference for any type of liquor.
• But for men, those who drank wine were least likely to gain prodigiously. The exception was for drinking one day a week: Those who drank beer once a week had better odds against abdominal obesity than those who drank wine once a week.

One more interesting finding: A lot of us in the fitness biz assumed that drinking makes you fat, either by simple addition of the calories in beer or wine, or because your body will metabolize alcohol at the expense of fat -- in other words, your body will store whatever fat you're eating because it's trying to get rid of the alcohol, which can't be stored. Then there's the disinhibition factor: If you're drinking, you're more likely to cut loose and eat all kinds of crap you wouldn't ordinarily ingest.

But this study, along with previous ones, shows that people who drink the most frequently tend to eat less food than people who don't drink at all. The effect was slightly bigger for men than for women, and even for men it wasn't huge -- just a couple hundred calories a day at the extremes. (And it's worth noting that men and women who drink the most are also more likely to smoke than moderate drinkers, which I think would reduce their appetites.) Still, it shows that drinking and eating aren't the killer combo we assumed they would be.

The authors guess that frequent alcohol consumption offers protection against ab fat because of an increase in thermogenesis, meaning that it takes more calories to process alcohol than food. Thus, you'd burn more calories in digestion and have fewer that could be stored as fat.

The good news? Yet another reason for us guys to have a glass of wine with dinner tonight, and for women to unwind with an ice-cold brewski.

Wednesday blog meat

• Here's a cool commentary that ran Sunday in the San Francisco Chronicle: Women should quit resisting push-ups and admit that it's a fair measure of strength, something that's vitally important to women. If you can't do a push-up, it's not because of your gender. It's because you aren't as strong as you should be. (Somebody should write a book about that, don't you think?)
• Major geek points if you can get through this article about cognitive dissonance by John Tierney in yesterday's New York Times. I never knew there was such a thing as the Monty Hall Problem, but now I think I understand it. Which is ... well, it's completely irrelevant to my life and work, but kind of fun to think about.