Want a tip on weight loss? Don’t ask Mick Jagger | David Mitchell

There’s no point looking to celebrities for dietary advice – they have their own weird reasons for being thin

People won’t take dietary advice from obese nurses, but they will from stick-thin film stars – with terrible results in both cases. That was the news last week.

The first half of the above is an inference from a study in the journal BMJ Open saying that about 25% of nurses in the NHS are obese, a discovery the report’s lead author, Dr Richard Kyle of Edinburgh Napier University, declared to be “deeply worrying”. The depth of his concern surprised me considering that about 25% of the adult population is obese, which he must have known. So, what he’s found is that nurses are, on average, neither thinner nor fatter than the general population which, if I were him, is precisely what I would expect to find. Then again, calling the findings “deeply predictable” would probably have been a kick in the teeth for the people who’d just paid him to find them.

People unquestioningly believe the thin and rich, and ignore out of hand the utterances of the poor and chubby

Continue reading... December 10, 2017 at 03:30PM