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ShareIf you have got it, flaunt it. Be proud of your thunder thighs, reader, if you have them. According to new research by Danish scientists, fat thighs may signify a long and healthy life. After diligent thigh-watching and much analysis, scientists at the University Hospitals of Copenhagen and Glostrup have suggested that thinner thighs may imply early death, especially if your thighs are under 18 inches in circumference.
For reasons of incomprehension, I will not go into the technicalities of this historic, pro-plump pronouncement. With all due sympathy for the skinny lot, I must say that such findings will make a lot of us, men and women of substance, happy.
In fact, it's not just thigh thoughts. Several recent health discoveries give us reason to rejoice. Do you hate exercise? Do you prefer to laze about? Love chocolate? Do you swear and cuss? Do you get angry and show it? Great! You seem to be very healthy and will no doubt outlive all the polite, exercising, hardworking weight-watchers who never cuss or get angry, refuse chocolates, and feel smugly superior.
So perk up, lazybones, your time has come. After years of painstaking research, meticulous Swedish researchers at the Stockholm Institute have found that lazy people live about 15 to 20 years longer than hard-working people with busy schedules. Hard work leads to an early death, they ruled, and should be strictly avoided. (Did they regret their own years of hard work to get to this conclusion? Did they all quickly become lazy researchers after this for reasons of health?)
Some of us have always known that laziness is good for you -- we felt it in our bones. We watched ignorant fools importantly spinning like tops and were delighted when German scientists -- a father-daughter duo -- spoke up for us. In 2001, they declared that the more active the body is, the more free radicals it produces, which speeds up ageing and hastens death. Laziness keeps the free radicals down and boosts the immune system.
Exercise and work pressure produce cortisol, the stress hormone, which damages cells and causes memory loss and general debility. In their book Joy Of Laziness, Peter Axt and Michaela Axt-Gadderman pointed out that people live longer if they sleep for eight to nine hours every night and nap during the day, and avoid too much work and exercise.
Long-distance running, for example, uses up energy that the body would otherwise use for cell renewal. So being lazy is a smart move, if you want a long and healthy life with your memory in good shape. Be happy, sweet sloth bear, and celebrate laziness as a healthy habit.
It gets better. Now, British scientists have found that cussing has health benefits. Researchers at Keele University declared that swearing actually helped ease pain by making us more aggressive. Swearing, an age-old habit of humankind, taps into emotional brain centres and reduces our sensitivity to pain.
Even anger -- the declared enemy of the hypertensive -- is now a health aid. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University believe appropriate anger helps you to feel in control, which keeps blood pressure normal. So go ahead, show your anger. It's much better than keeping it bottled up, or feeling afraid, both of which raise your blood pressure.
And chocolate, they now tell us, is good for the heart, promotes healing, and makes you happy, which itself has great health benefits.
So in the light of new scientific developments, we must change our habits once more. Don't bite your tongue and be polite when in distress; swear out loud. Don't hide your anger; show it. Eat chocolates, avoid hard work and hard exercise, and be proud of your thunder thighs. And sleep. Take naps. Most of all, be happy with yourself. Think about it. Meanwhile, I'm off to bed.
The writer is editor, The Little Magazine
