Duncan Bannatyne: A Threat To The Nation's Health

Oh dear. If you were a smug, self-declared health guru, I expect you'd feel rather uncomfortable reading things like this.

The fitness market was worth £682m in 1996, £1.6bn in 2001 and is now stable at £2.5bn (these are Mintel figures). In the UK, 5.2 million adults have membership of a private gym. That market penetration is phenomenal. I don't want to labour the point about how this correlates with obesity, because some people – myself, for instance – have membership and don't use it. But put it this way: whether we're using the gym or not, as a cohort, it's not making us any thinner.

One of the reasons for this is that vigorous exercise stimulates your appetite. So a 20-minute run might use up 200 calories, but your hunger won't necessarily – indeed, almost certainly won't – restrain itself to that amount of extra food.

So someone who promotes 60 fitness centres, for example, could be fuelling that there global 'obesity epidemic'?

Hmmm, kinda reminds me of this article I read yesterday.

Can regular exercise avert or undo some of the harm associated with binge drinking? Perhaps even better, could exercising beforehand pre-emptively reduce your urge to overindulge in alcohol later? Or does exercising actually drive you to drink?

[...]

Half of the rats were given access to running wheels for three weeks. The others were kept in cages without wheels. After three weeks, the running wheels were removed, and half of the animals from each group were allowed unlimited access to alcohol for 21 days. [...] the exercising animals turned to alcohol with significantly more enthusiasm than the sedentary rats, mainly during the first week of the experiment. “It was a bit of surprise,” Dr. Leasure said.

But the findings are right in line with those from a recent, large-scale national survey of human subjects published in The American Journal of Health Promotion.

What? You mean that those who profit from gyms are doing so, at the expense of the country's finances, by contributing to the binge-drinking epidemic, too?

The bastards!

No wonder Bannatyne drones on about smoking so much, it's - quite obviously - merely a diversionary tactic to disguise his own selfish disregard for the health of the nation. Innit.