Wallace and Gromit fight obesity?

January 2, 11:34 AMDenver Low Carb ExaminerLinda Duffy

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Wallace & Gromit

Wallace and Gromit, claymation stars of tv and movies, are teaming up with the British government in an effort to fight obesity. 

"The TV adverts by Nick Park's Aardman Animations featuring plasticine figures is the centrepiece of the Change4Life drive to reduce the 9,000 premature deaths linked to obesity in Britain every year.

The campaign, which includes 75 million pounds of government marketing cash over three years, and support from 33 companies, aims to reverse the forecast that by 2050 up to 90 percent of today's children will be overweight or obese." (more)

The first piece is reported to show man evolving from caveman to couch potato, furthering the idea that a lack of exercise is the cause of obesity. Too bad the data on that isn't holding up. This passage from Gary Taubes in the UK Guardian sums up the exercise = weight loss issue quite well.

"There was a time when virtually no one believed exercise would help a person lose weight. Until the Sixties, clinicians who treated obese and overweight patients dismissed the notion as naive. When Russell Wilder, an obesity and diabetes specialist at the Mayo Clinic, lectured on obesity in 1932, he said his fat patients tended to lose more weight with bed rest, 'while unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of loss'.

The problem, as he and his contemporaries saw it, is that light exercise burns an insignificant number of calories - amounts that are undone by comparatively effortless changes in diet. In 1942, Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan calculated that a 17st man expends only three calories climbing a flight of stairs - the equivalent of depriving himself of a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar or 100th of an ounce of butter. 'He will have to climb 20 flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread,' Newburgh observed. So why not skip the stairs, skip the bread, and call it a day?"  (more)

While I am a big Wallace and Gromit fan and alway love to see the work of Aardman Animations, I fail to see how having a couple of stop-motion, pot-bellied cracker addicts is going to inspire British children to suddenly get slim. Maybe if we can get Wallace to admit that crackers are nothing but little wafers of sugar, there would actually be a chance this campaign would be helpful. Wallace...Gromit...just stick with the cheese boys.