There is a long standing obsession within the media; it would seem, to scare individuals, particularly women to lose weight. Now don’t get me wrong it is vitally important to educate people about health issues so that they can take appropriate steps to improve their health and wellbeing however, the main issue I have with headlines such as the one above is that they are misleading and often do not really tell the whole story. With media being received all over the world on a myriad of media devices there are millions of people being fed incorrect information. Just to put the record straight, there has actually been what seems to be a very well thought out study by the Medical Research Council that stated:

“…that 7 per cent of men and 4.4 per cent of women who were overweight and had a large waist went on to develop diabetes within 10 years. This risk was equivalent to, or in some cases higher than, obese participants.

In contrast, risk was much lower in normal weight participants who had a small waist, with only 1.2 per cent of men and 0.6 per cent of women in this group developing diabetes over the same time period.”

Again I am guilty to a certain extent of only quoting a small portion of the report and I would urge you to seek out the full article for yourself. The correlations and statistics involved are not difficult but perhaps require a little thought; perhaps this is where the media struggles in applying some common sense to real issues and yet again turning this into a “fat women” issue. There is some negativity and fear involved in the area of statistics too, again mainly down to the abuse and misuse of statistics and data by the media and unfortunately this leads to quotes and misquotes made by eminent individuals and academics that sometimes diminish many years of work. My plea is really in vain but it would be for everybody, the media included to please get the facts right before making glib statements