Corner Bar? More Like Coronary Bar!

Imagine, for a moment, that it's the end of a very long week. Work's been killer. And you haven't found much comfort at home either. You've been on the move nonstop since Monday morning, and what you really want right now is a nice beer at your local neighborhood bar. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. 

A cold beer after work may be one of life's great and simple pleasures, but you can always trust scientists to ruin the fun, and the concept of the local bar and/or restaurant is no exception. Enter a group of epidemiologists from Tulane University in New Orleans and their research into the relationship between heart health and proximity to ready-to-eat food environments. 

Specifically, the researchers pulled data from the UK Biobank – a massive database containing health information from over 500,000 adults – over a 12-year period, ultimately including 13,000 cases of heart failure. With that data collected, they measured the patients' proximity to ready-to-eat food establishments: bars and pubs, restaurants, and fast-food restaurants, as well as the density of those establishments.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who lived in high-density restaurant environments had a greater risk of heart failure pretty much across the board. Those who had high densities of bars and restaurants with 1 km of their home had a 16% greater risk of heart failure, compared with those who had no such outlets nearby. People who lived within 500 meters of a bar or pub had a 13% greater risk of heart failure, compared with those who lived more than 2 km from one.

While the finding linking heart failure and exposure to bars and restaurants is new, the authors noted that it is in line with expectations, since other studies have found similar links with disorders such as type 2 diabetes and obesity. To combat this, the researchers suggested improving access to healthier food choices and physical fitness facilities would likely reduce the increased risk of heart failure that goes along with unhealthy food and sweet, delicious beer. 

Now, whether or not people will choose to go to a salad bar instead of a beer bar is ... questionable, especially in England, land of the pub right down the street. And it just goes to show that, even in the Big Easy, land of Mardi Gras, every party needs a pooper.