A well-timed report has made a few suggestions to minimise the damage from excess mirth and merry-making this Christmas, unfortunately they involve something other than the couch and leftover turkey.

Studies have shown that a few days a week of energy surplus - where you consume more calories than you burn – has detrimental health impacts. The latest study shows that a daily bout of exercise generates vast physiological benefits even when you consume much more than you burn.

It turns out exercise does a lot more than just reduce energy surplus.

Anyone feeling that their Christmas gifts have come in the form of extra flab or a new pant size should think about burning some energy to deal with the excess.

“This new research shows that the picture is more sophisticated than ‘energy’ alone: exercise has positive effects even when we are actively storing energy and gaining weight,” says researcher James Betts from The University of Bath

In the study, 26 healthy young people were asked to be largely inactive in their daily activities, half of the group exercised daily on a treadmill for 45 minutes. All participants were asked to overeat; the non-exercising group increased their caloric intake by 50 per cent, while the exercising group increased by 75 per cent, so each person’s net daily energy surplus was the same.

In tests after just a single week of overeating, patients showed poor blood sugar control and their fat cells were expressing genes that lead to unhealthy metabolic changes and disrupted nutritional balance. However, these negative effects were markedly less in those who were exercising.

“A critical feature of our experiment is that we matched the energy surplus between groups – so the exercise group consumed even more energy and were still better off at the end of the week,” said a senior author on the paper, Dr Dylan Thompson.

Striking results came after blood tastes were taken one week into the trial. The non-exercising group showed a significant and unhealthy decline in their blood sugar control, and their fat cells were over-expressing genes linked to unhealthy metabolic changes, as well as under-expressing genes involved in well-functioning metabolism.

However, the exercising group had stable blood sugar levels and their fat cells showed less 'undesirable' genetic expression.

Jean-Philippe Walhin, a researcher on the study, says; “short-term overfeeding and reduced physical activity had a dramatic impact on the overall metabolic health of the participants and on various key genes within fat tissue – and exercise prevented these negative changes even though energy was still being stored.”

Further investigations are now being conducted.