Why would you listen to a government health message, or your GP, when the Sunday Telegraph has more exciting news? "Health warning: exercise makes you fat" is the kind of full-width headline you want to see across a broadsheet page: it's affirmative, it's reassuring, and it gives you clear permission to sit on your arse all day. "Re-programming body fat is the key to weight loss, not working out." Praise be. "Is it possible exercise is doing nothing to make us slimmer?" Please let the answer be yes.
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I have this trial in front of me. It's simply not true. Only 15% of all participants gained weight during the study, and these were the only people to increase their food intake, but the weight gained even by these people was lean tissue, and they lost fat tissue.
In fact, what the Telegraph don't tell you, bafflingly, is that overall, participants doing supervised exercise in this trial lost more weight. People doing exercise lost 3.2kg more weight, on average, over just 12 weeks.Prof Blundell says: "The Telegraph article was a complete distortion of the facts of our investigation, which showed that exercise is very effective for weight loss. They completely reversed the outcome of our study."
Misleading journalism such as this is becoming a public health problem. We've previously seen the evidence that people change their health behaviour in response to what they read in the media.To add to this, the World Cancer Research Fund recently commissioned a survey from YouGov. This was a proper survey, in a representative sample, from a reputable data collector, where anyone is allowed to see the questions and the results, not a secret PR survey to get free advertising in a newspaper. Healthy living advice hasn't changed at all for at least a decade – don't smoke, exercise, eat more fruit and veg. And a quarter of all respondents said that because scientists keep changing their minds, you might as well eat whatever you want, because it won't make any difference anyway. Have another pastry and put the telly on
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/29/telegraph-exercise-fat-bad-science