Interesting Facts

According to a recent study of around 9,000 British pets by pet insurer Animal Friends, the number of  cats diagnosed with diabetes has skyrocketed by  1,161 percent over the past five years. (The fact is people who feed cats human food are shortening their lives. In addition more than half of the cats kept indoors are dangerously overweight. I've never understood the idea of an indoor cat. Spooky and Moose would never have stood for it.) 

According to a new study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal if you want to lose weight you should take public transport. (Seemingly you can benefit from the ‘incidental’ physical activity involved".  They'll be telling us we should walk to work next! How much do these people get paid?)

The balls used in men's and women's tennis are different. (They are the same size, weight and pressure: between 2½ and 2 5/8 inches (6.35 and 6.67 cm) in diameter and weighing between 2 and 2 1/16 ounces (57.7 and 58.5 grams) but balls used by men have an extra-duty felt covering, which increases air resistance and slows the overall speed. Women players use regular-duty felt. Professional tennis player Bob Bryan, who uses both kinds of balls on the men's and mixed doubles circuit, believes he can add around six mph to his serve when playing with the women's regular balls. It is very difficult to write about this without sounding silly.)

Surprise, surprise, fruit is good for you (I can hear my mother now - I told you so.) According to researchers at Harvard if you want to lose weight, you should stop eating peas, potatoes and sweetcorn, and start eating cauliflower, prunes and blueberries. (Surprisingly fruit was twice as good as veg, with every extra portion a day leading to around half a pound of flab being shed over four years. Prunes, apples, pears, strawberries, raisins and grapes, also scored high on the weight loss scale. Blueberries were actually the number 1 fat burner.  I can't stand them, but I need to shed some weight, so maybe I'll just have to take my medicine.)

The caber, used in the Highland sport tossing the caber, is typically 19' 6" long (5.94 m) tall and weighs 175 pounds (79 kg). (The caber is not thrown, it is tossed, and it's not distance that matters, it's all about style. The "tosser"  rests the caber against his shoulder and lifts it vertically off the ground. The objective is to toss the caber in such a way that it turns end over end in the air and lands with the lower end pointing towards the tosser in a relative twelve o'clock position. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest caber ever tossed was 25 feet long and weighed 280 pounds. I wonder what they call the guy who tossed that one.)

According to figures obtained under Freedom of Information laws, up to 74 morbidly obese children are estimated to have been taken into care in the UK over the last five years. (Information released by councils showed that 183 under-11s weighed more than 16st. 21 of the fattest 100 children in England were in London, 16 were in the West Midlands and 14 in the South East, but the two heaviest primary school pupils in England – a boy of 23st 2lb and a girl of 22st 11lb – lived in the North West. Allowing children in your care to become obese is considered to be child neglect, because it puts them at risk of developing serious conditions in adulthood such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer.)

According to a recent review to assess levels of fitness in Britain's police, over half of Metropolitan Police officers are overweight. (To be exact, 52 per cent of male officers and staff were overweight, 22 per cent were obese and 1 per cent were morbidly obese. You would think that chasing all those criminals would keep them fit.)

According to government figures, the NHS in the UK spends around £85m a year on gastric bypass operations. (Between April 2006 and March 2012, the NHS carried out 18,577 gastric bypass and 7,650 gastric band operations. These weight-loss operations, sometimes called 'bariatric surgery', work by restricting the amount of nutrients that can be digested and absorbed. Of course, people could always try simply eating less.)

According to the charity BackCare, growing numbers of children in the UK are developing irreversible back deformities because of the weight of the bags they carry to school. (Pupils often have to carry bags filled with heavy books, laptops, sports kit and packed lunches, and their bag may weigh as much as 28 lbs. According to experts, children risk long-term and ultimately permanent damage if they regularly carry more than 15 per cent of their body weight over their shoulders and because children’s skeletons are still growing, carrying heavy bags can cause lasting damage. The British newspaper, the Daily Mail, worked out that bags can weigh up to 2 stone, which they calculated as:- Textbooks - 8lb 13oz Laptop - 8lb 13oz Lunchbox - 1lb 11oz Bottle of water - 1lb 11oz Exercise books - 1lb 1oz Pencil case - 1lb 1oz PE Kit - 1lb 1oz Sports shoes - 1lb 1oz Coat - 13oz Diary - 9oz Game console - 8oz Mobile phone - 5oz MP3 player - 5oz Wallet and ...

A study of babies at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, in west London, found that overweight mothers 'give birth to fat babies'. (Newborn babies usually have about 700g of adipose tissue (fat tissue), but for each unit increase in maternal BMI (body mass index), this increased by approximately 7g with a huge build-up in fat in the babies’ livers. Maybe we need little pre natal treadmills.)

You would weigh less at the Equator! (But not much less! While standing at the equator you are further away from the bulk of Earth’s mass than at the poles which results in less than a pound! But it's a pretty instant diet.)

According to the Office for National Statistics, us Brits are fatter and lonelier than in the 1970s, (Seemingly, in the good old 70s there were fewer divorces (read people felt obliged to make their beds and lie on them), people were more neighbourly (read nosey) and churchgoing (read sanctimonious). In addition, more mothers stayed at home looking after their children (read became MCPBs). The good news is, that according to the same statistics (and anyone who really knows me knows what I think of them), we also live longer and take more foreign holidays. Whoopee!)

A report published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, says that overweight elderly people may live longer than those of normal weight. (But you've got to be overweight in the right way, a fine line between a few healthy extra pounds and being obese. And even if you're overweight, you have to keep active - sedentary lifestyles shortened lives across all weight groups. But I'll be alright, I've just been shovelling snow.)

According to research from France's National Institute of Demographic studies, France has the highest proportion of clinically underweight women in Europe. (France is the one country in which both sexes are solidly in the "normal" weight bracket, and the only one in which more than five percent of women are officially "underweight". The problem is only half of them think they are too thin.)

Abdominal fat is the most dangerous. (It is known to increase the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and some cancers. So start doing those sit ups now.)

powered by ODEO Babies in Germany are getting bigger. (20 years ago the average birth weight of a baby was 3,500 grams. Today it is nearly 4,000 grams. It's thought that genes play a factor, but also the better nutrition of the birth mother. A similar thing is happening in the UK and unfortunately the effect has been more surgery for mothers. Caesareans increased last year to a rate of nearly one in four of all births in Britain, up from one in 33 in the 1950s.)

At -40° Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing. (Brrrr - That's a high price to pay for losing a bit of weight.)

Women often put on weight as a result of moving in with a man. (Research shows that women tend to gain weight once they cohabit and begin to share meals with men who intrinsically have higher energy needs and therefore appetites. Well that's my excuse anyway, maybe I could make the "No man diet" an internet hit.)