Walk Tall

I don't know when it happened - I just didn't notice at first - but those television adverts for magic potions and such like have changed.  They used to feature a sentence along the lines of "89% of women agree".  It was always women - it still is - possibly because men just couldn't care a tuppenny damn about having softly illuminating skin (or whatever it is) but there is a small difference nowadays in that sentence.  Small, but significant.  Well, it's significant to me.  Have you noticed, they now state the number of women quizzed and the sentence now reads "89% of 154 women agree".  I can't claim to have made a deep study of those adverts but it seems to me that they always, always, mention a surprisingly low number of women.  I think 216 is the highest number I've seen.  Why is that, I wonder?  Do the snake oil salesmen have difficulty in finding women who will admit to have used their product?  Or is it that they just can't be bothered to do the research?

It really is on no consequence.  But on the matter of research, I gave up counting the number of articles in today's newspaper reporting the results of research undertaken.  There were just two where the headline caught my eye.  The first concerned pasta.  Now I do enjoy eating pasta dishes and, now that I seem to be always the duty chef, I cook pasta at least once a week.  The Old Bat enjoys pasta dishes as well and I'm trying to get some weight back onto her bones so this seems a good idea.  But what I will not be doing is leaving the pasta to go cold and then re-heating it.

The first article I read reported that, for some reason I really didn't grasp, research was undertaken into how pasta affects people.  As far as I understand it, pasta, when served hot, is a carbohydrate and, if the calories are not burned off by exercise, weight will increase as a result of eating it.  For some reason, eating the pasta cold has less of an effect.  But re-heated pasta is not a carbohydrate; it is fibre, so doesn't lead to weight gain.

Did you really want to know that?  I'm sure I couldn't care less.  But now for that other research.

People who are down in the dumps tend to walk slouched, hands in pockets.  Sort of scuffing along.  Happy people walk with heads up, shoulders back and arms swinging gently.  Yes, I knew that from my own experience - and I'm sure plenty of other people have spotted it as well.  But, and here's the rub, research shows that how we walk affects our mood.  if we slouch along, scuffing the ground, with our hands in our pockets, we experience negative feelings, increasing the down in the dumps mood.  But even if we start off feeling that way but hold our heads up, walk tall, shoulders back - we experience more positive thoughts and feelings.  And it's quite true.  But why it needed a university (or whoever) to conduct that research is beyond me.

And just to prove that it's old hat, an Irishman named Val Doonican sing a song about it way back in the 60s.  Here he is: