*calories 840From: Third Age Gluttony Is Good for You
Eat up. The fatter you are, the less likely you are to get depressed and commit suicide.
Clichés only turn into clichés because they’re true. Otherwise, they just become a weird thing that someone in a bank once said to you.
Scientists in Bristol in southwest England have discovered that fat people are more cheerful than their thin peers. This was just a revivification of the ancient (well … maybe 25-year-old) wisdom that says you shouldn’t go on a totally fat-free diet because your brain needs its fat surround to keep from crashing against your skull. That makes you depressed, apparently. But you don’t have to be obese to maintain this fatty covering; you just have to not be anorexic.
Nor is this a reworking of the slightly less ancient study that found that people with notable self-control, people who weren’t “appetitive,” were more likely to be depressed.
The usefulness of this survey was opaque. It appeared to demonstrate that hedonists were happier than puritans. Nobody needs a scientist to tell them that. They just need to study the works of Chaucer. Or Dickens. Or most TV soaps. The people enjoying themselves are the fat, jolly ones. The people who worry about how they look, and what people think of them, and what God might think, and whether drinking too much mead will turn out to be a signal that they are bound for hell — those people don’t enjoy themselves so much.
