Fear and Thermostats

Oh fear and "the Media." How well you do together. You go hand and hand like death and taxes. While FOX News may have perfected the art of scaring parents and good Samaritans into locking their doors at midday and arming themselves with anti artillery weaponry for the inevitable gang wars baring down upon their uptown Suburbia gated communities, no Media outlet is immune to, or above, the call of scaring the shit out of normal people (that read the news.)

"The Body Odd" (a segment on the MSN News website) has recently run an article titled "Turn down the thermostat, your heater may be making you fat." It's not the type of scare-tactic I'm used to, but it worked--it's certainly something special.

The article is essentially about possibilities--not substantiated evidence, but research currently suggests that a warmer room may actually slow down your metabolism. (According UK Health Behavior Research Centre at University College, London.) "Lowering your thermostat may reduce not only your spending, but also your weight, a new study suggests." (That opening line would have been a more positive, and friendly heading for the MSN reader, but it doesn't make you want to run away screaming, so the editor couldn't, in good conscience, use it as a title.)

I understand the premise, for example, it is a proven fact that humans (really most creatures) eat more in cold weather (i.e. the winter.) We do so to warm up our cores (stomachs, heart...internals) and build more fat, to keep toasty and generally less frozen. It's pretty simple. However, it's also been researched into that, in the warmer parts of the year, our metabolisms do not slow down, rather our intakes change. We eat less voraciously but consume higher quantities of liquid to supply our sweat glands with...the stuff that makes sweat.

In fact, the research in this article is limited to warming up your house in the winter, stating that, due to the cold weather outside (blah blah) you'll still eat more, because you are genetically inclined to do so, but when you get into the warmth, your body will stop metabolizing as quickly, because it's not cold anymore. The moral of the entire article comes down to this: if you feel like the heat or lack of heat is contributing to you gaining all that winter weight (not the copious amounts of turkey and bake goods you ate throughout the Holidays) you should turn down the thermostat and wear a sweatshirt.

It all ends up being moot anyway, because the researcher states that the main factors of obesity and health in general will still be food and drink intake and exercise. She was just interested in temperature and needed to do research, it's that or not get paid by the University. The writer for MSN, in similar fashion, realized that without writing an article, she would not get paid. Soon after the MSN editor hopped on board and said "if she does research, and she writes an article, and people click it, we (more likely 'I') get paid" so the editor put "making you fat" in the title, and boom, instant website traffic.

Because while we may hate it, the American people have a morbid fascination with their (our) own doom. We wait for it, watch for it, almost expectantly, with all the power of the deer so famously stuck in the onrushing headlights. Scare tactics sell papers, get viewers and readers. It works. So they do it.

It worked for me, I clicked. But I took the path less traveled, I clicked the link with my eyes squinted and a part grimace part sarcastic grin thing going on, so hopefully my click counted for less, because I was being facetious (and that made all the difference.)