Here's news of a study that indicates reading books can help children lose weight:
In a study of 45 girls, those who read a book which promoted exercise and a healthy lifestyle saw their body mass index drop.
Researchers at North Carolina's Duke Children's Hospital in America gave 31 obese girls, aged between 9 and 13, a novel called Lake Rescue which has an overweight girl in it.
They discovered that six months later the girls who read the book had a reduced BMI of almost one per cent.
The sample is ridiculously small and therefore not, in my opinion, reliable as science, but it's certainly interesting. Fiction matters. Fiction changes our lives. Fiction is good for you (as well as being, y'know, delicious). The stories we tell really do make a difference. I've written about this before but, hey, now there's (the beginnings of) proof.
