To be fair, though, it's not just the BBC - it just reported it on its website and then followed it up with a debate on Today this morning between a silly man called Fry and some other dude who wasn't quite so silly - it's a bunch of extremely silly scientists who have published a very silly paper on the relationship between exercise and obesity in children. To call the scientists' conclusions "silly", as covered in the BBC web story is, however, to be very generous. They're not merely silly, to my mind they're potentially dangerous.The researchers at the EarlyBird Diabetes Study, based at the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, has been following a group of more than 200 city school children for the past 11 years.
As part of the long-term study, they monitored body fat and exercise at regular intervals over three years.
They found no indication that doing more physical activity had any effect on weight, but they did find that children who put on weight did relatively less exercise.And so it goes on, hedging and blurring its way to the final, soggy-wet-fish-in-the-gob conclusion - that without exercise children get fat and when they get fat they do less exercise and, because of their big tummies, crave more food. Well, duh.
How many millions of pounds was wasted on this ridiculous study just so the ultra-bleedin' obvious could be restated, but couched in pseudo-scientific terms, complete with the thinnest of anecdotal statistical 'links'?
But that's not the point is it? The real point, if the the Today broadcast this morning was anything to go on, is that this just represents yet another extension of the ongoing battle between intervention and information, between the answer of the Left (to ban and order) and the libertarian Right (to inform, suggest and trust).
The BBC, in its boundless silliness, has clearly decided that Andrew Lansley's decision to reverse the previous government's failed policies on people eating too much and not exercising enough, and save enormous sums of money into the bargain, must be challenged - because a new study, however silly, says so; because something called the "National Obesity Forum" says so. Because the improbable Mr Fry, who wants to regulate the entire food industry and then, presumably, eating itself, says so.
In other words, because nanny (the interventionist Left) says so. If it wasn't so pathetic it really would be silly.
Oh, by the way, if you want children to be less fat, feed them fruit, milk, bread & butter and beans on toast and let them play for as long as they want every day - which will be a lot. Oh, right, in Labour's Britain, even play must be regulated - and the streets aren't safe any more (we are led to believe by the generally hysterical media), so buy the little darlings an Xbox and plonk them in front of the TV out of the way...and see what happens (has happened).
Unlock your children, folks. They need the exercise!
