Helping Obese Mice (humor)

OK, I admit it. I'm a worrier. I worry about big issues, like climate change. But I also worry about smaller issues, like what I would do if we had five straight days of snow so I couldn't get out and I was almost out of toilet paper and coffee.

[Correction: Being out of coffee is a big issue.]

But one thing I don't worry about a lot is obese mice. As long as they don't eat all my food, I don't care how svelte my resident mice are. So when I saw an article titled "Watermelon supplements bring health benefits to obese mice," I didn't exactly race to the supermarket to buy watermelon for my live-in mice.

I did wonder why the researchers even thought about giving mice watermelon in the first place. Were they sitting around in the shade some hot day eating watermelon when one of them said, "Say, I wonder if watermelon would solve the urgent national problem of obese mice? Might they have a better self-image if they were healthier after eating this fruit?"

Then I read on. "The study was funded by the National Watermelon Promotion Board."  Ah, that explains it.

Food industry groups support research that takes some product they're pushing, extracting something from it, and giving a lot of the extract to mice or people, hoping it will show some benefit. If it doesn't, you'll never hear about it: "Kale extract doesn't help diabetics" is a headline you'll never see in your newspaper, ever. If it does help, the story will be trumpeted everywhere: "Kale extract may cure diabetes in platypuses." Even if the effect is miniscule and the test organism rare, the PR experts hope you won't remember the details, just "cure diabetes," so you'll buy a lot of it.

Thus unless you're losing sleep over the problems of fat mice, when you see news stories lauding some common food as an obesity or diabetes treatment, see who sponsored the study. If it's a food industry group, take the findings with a grain of salt.

Unless, of course, you're on a low-salt diet.