London – It was sadly predictable.
Here is one of the many online responses to the astonishing news, widely reported recently, that the fatter you are, the more likely you are to avoid losing your mind: “Was going to go to the gym after work but it's pub, chips and kebab now… dementia is the worst ending imaginable.”
Or how about this one: “A boost for Big Macs, pizzas, kebabs and curries then as brain food?!”
The survey, which was published in the highly respected journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, correlates individual body mass index (BMI) with diagnoses of dementia over nine years for more than two million people in Britain. The statistics show unquestionably that those with a BMI of 20 or lower run a significantly higher risk of dementia as they get older.
This week also signalled doom for short people, who seem to be more vulnerable to heart disease than everyone else. So if you are a short, thin person it might be a good time to think about emigrating to a news-free zone, because of all the unmitigated bad news out there.
For the rest of us, shall we all go to hell in a reinforced handcart? Let's just rip up the rule book which suggests that turning into waddlers is a Very Bad Thing and slosh on the sunflower oil. Hoorah! Break open the jumbo packs of Haribo and serve them with triple portions of Pringles and extra melted cheese on the side. Because the risk of dementia is so horrendous a thought that it makes the other demons typically attendant on obesity - diabetes, heart disease, stroke, you know the routine - pale into, if not insignificance, then certainly things which can be treated with equanimity.
Really? Diabetes is not for the faint hearted and, as far as stroke or heart disease goes, who wants to take that route? If you are prematurely felled by one of the above because you weigh 20 stone, then you won't have stuck around long enough to gain the benefits of dementia protection anyway.
I don't doubt the accuracy of the science behind the report but the message it transmits is confusing, not least because when I arrive on the start line for a half marathon or marathon, there is typically at least one person beside me wearing a T-shirt supporting an Alzheimer's charity. Rigorous physical exercise, we have been told, is far more important in keeping the decline of the brain at bay than are popular “brain-training” exercises such as Sudoku. Is that now all wrong? Should we just forget about all of that, cancel the gym membership, kick off our running shoes and take to our sofas in anticipation of elasticated waistbands? Or is this report simply another of those ones in which statistics fly in the face of common sense?
Of course, medical studies are important; only a fool would dismiss the famous survey by Richard Doll (performed on fellow doctors) which originally confirmed beyond question the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Yet I can't help feeling that there needs to be quite a lot more thinking about this one before we all embrace a super-size future. Not least because obese people have such a clearly limiting lifestyle, as anyone who has ever visited the US (outside New York City) will see. Is BMI a creditable measurement (many doctors suggest it is not)? And are we ready to fund a healthcare system that will have to deal with a pandemic of unhalted diabetes because we all fear the possibility of losing our marbles? Furthermore, would you rather be fat or risk the possibility of going ga-ga at some indeterminate point in the future? I hate to sound shallow, but I know which option I would choose.
The Independent