If you live a healthy life, eating all the right things and doing plenty of exercise, then you’ll live a long and happy existence… or at least that’s what ‘the brochure’ says. But what if someone told you that was all nonsense, poppycock, a load of old rot? What if a bad diet and no exercise was actually the key? Well, there would be a lot more tofu-hating salad-dodging overweight people in the world to start off with, but apparently, according to a new study that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
The largest study of its kind into the causes of dementia, carried out on nearly two million British men and women, came to the controversial conclusion that being overweight actually cuts your risk of suffering from dementia by a significant margin.
The team reviewed the medical records of all participants, whose average age was 55 at the beginning of the study, for 20 years to come to this surprising result.
Lead researcher, Dr Nawab Qizilbash, defended their results saying:
“The controversial side is the observation that overweight and obese people have a lower risk of dementia than people with a normal, healthy body mass index.
That’s contrary to most if not all studies that have been done, but if you collect them all together our study overwhelms them in terms of size and precision.”
This does not mean that medical advice is going to change anytime soon to include copious amounts of extra chocolaty-chocolate fudge cake (more’s the pity!) because obviously obesity comes with its own suite of health issues that are life shortening by their very nature. But any study that discovers something more about one of life’s most debilitating conditions is a positive step in the right direction, and of course if it helps to reduce a little of the guilt felt around a hearty teatime snack then so be it!