Exercise makes you fat

So said the headlines in the Telegraph a few days ago. (Interestingly, in the online version the big banner headline becomes the web page title, and so is much less visible at the top of your browser window.)

Fortunately, the article is much more moderate than the headline. Journalists often make many mistakes, but they often don’t write the headlines, and editors are much more concerned with sales figures than with accuracy. Creeping tabloidism has been infecting almost all of our broadsheets for many years, but how many readers will register that the article doesn’t really back up the headline imprinted in their memory?

Ben Goldacre has found himself a nice niche dissing – I believe that is the mot du jour – such reports after examining the evidence. Here’s his response to this one.

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