OK, so a friend of mine recently posted a link on Facebook to an article entitled ‘Why being ‘overweight’ means you live longer: the way scientists twist the facts’. I can’t lie, just the title alone made my blood boil. My main concern was, aside from what appeared to be an oversimplification of a phenomenon that scientists know as the ‘obesity paradox’, the title also plays beautifully into the ‘us vs them’ notion that academics are somehow untrustworthy. But, after my blood pressure settled, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and read the whole article –