Staying Skinny By Sitting?

Journalist love to use intriguing titles in order to get their readers' interest up and entice them into actually reading the article. Well, I'm one of those readers and their "trick" usually works on me. So naturally I couldn't resist when I recently saw this title:

To Stay Thin, Eat Like the Cultural Elite

Not that I have weight problems, but it sounded like an interesting suggestion. So I decided to read on.

It turns out that the author, Fred Pampel, used survey data from 17 (mostly European) countries to come up with the idea that people who engage in cultural activities are (on average) thinner than those who don't. In other words: If you want to stay skinny, you should read more!

Basically, he was able to divide participants into two groups. People who spent a lot of time reading, attending cultural events, going to movies and using the internet had a lower average Body Mass Index (BMI) than those who spent more time watching TV, socializing, playing cards, attending sporting events or shopping. Pampel tries to explain why this might be:

"So why might reading and related cultural activities be associated with thinness? The social meaning of the activity rather than the activity itself must be important for weight control. Leisure-time activities involve more than the calories burned; they also reflect differences across social groups in motives and means for good health. More highly educated people tend to both read more and weigh less. Perhaps knowledge gained from schooling gives insight into the importance of proper weight for good health."

I don't know about you, but to me, this sounds like he's trying to connect something that really isn't directly related to each other. In the article, he also admits that these results are not universal, only showing up in the survey results from Western Europe and Oceania. To me, that sounds like a correlation that just "accidentally" showed up in a certain part of the survey, but which is clearly overrated. Seeing this connection despite these limits makes for a nice and intriguing title, of course, and it leads people to read your articles (including me). But in the end, I find it a bit misleading and not very helpful. By the way, Pampel writes his best sentence at the very end of his article: "This does not mean a person looking to lose 10 pounds should join a book club rather than a health club."

Exactly. And guess what? I didn't have to read an article to know that...