Science and mince pies don’t make a good Christmas cocktail | David Mitchell

The blindingly obvious findings of a study of festive weight gain concealed a rather depressing fact

What I keep telling myself is that scientific research is not retrospectively rendered pointless just because the outcome is boring and predictable. It’s not like a TV drama. The human urge to understand the workings of the universe cannot necessarily be satisfied entertainingly. The apparently obvious has to be tested in experiment if it is to be thoroughly understood.

So I shouldn’t blame the researchers from the universities of Birmingham and Loughborough for the fact that their widely reported study into festive weight-gain, published last week in the British Medical Journal, produced such depressingly guessable results. I should blame those who reported it as if it was interesting and illuminating.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ExEq2u
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